


i want out from under, this confining skin

by InvertedPhantasmagoria



Category: Bleach
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amputation, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bathing/Washing, Blood and Gore, Broken Bones, Canon-Typical Violence, Caretaking, Character Development, Denial of Feelings, Developing Relationship, Eye Trauma, Food Issues, Gen, Hand Feeding, Healing, Hollows are miserable, Implied/Referenced Torture, Injury Recovery, Major Character Injury, Mutilation, Nightmares, Not Canon Compliant, Permanent Injury, Platonic Cuddling, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Recovery, Self-Hatred, Suffering, Suicidal Thoughts, Touch-Starved, Trauma, Trust Issues, mild xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2019-10-06 14:53:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17347259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InvertedPhantasmagoria/pseuds/InvertedPhantasmagoria
Summary: You’re over halfway home from work when you find the body.. . .((Written by arrancxr on tumblr. The exact kind of Hollow content anyone who's seen my blog should expect from me; excessive headcanon, sympathizing with minor characters, and getting very carried away with giving the Hollows nice things.))





	1. burst at every seam, bleeding through the gaps

**Author's Note:**

> Hey uh this took me like 2 months. It really shouldn't have. There will be a second chapter; not sure when, but it'll exist. I know what needs to happen in said chapter, and the story won't be done until I get there. Anyway, for anyone who didn't catch it, this is arrancxr on tumblr writing this :3 Check out my blog for more Hollow-obsessed writing!!

You’re over halfway home from work when you find the body. 

At first, you’re certain it’s a corpse. You don’t know how that much blood could possibly indicate anything still alive. It’s everywhere, pooling on the concrete in dark, wet puddles that shine in the evening light. 

In the center of it all is what looks like a person. It’s a man, not that you can tell too clearly from the mass of gore around him. He’s missing both legs, one arm above the elbow, and that’s just what you can see. There’s so much blood around him that you can’t make out much of anything, the wet, coppery smell making your stomach churn. He’s been left to rot by the side of the road, mutilated corpse dumped like unwanted trash. 

You’re fumbling with your phone, ready to call the police and give the man whatever dignity he has left, when the body  _ moves.  _

You scream. You don’t know who wouldn’t. 

The man moans like a dying thing and squirms, useless, bloody stumps twitching and trying to flex muscles that no longer exist. His eyes fly open, one nothing more than a bloody socket, fixing you with a panicked, pain-stricken gaze. His mouth slides open with a wet, bloody  _ pop,  _ and you’d imagine he’d be screaming if he had any breath left in him. Instead, he can do nothing more than wriggle like a caught insect, squirming in a puddle of his own still-warm blood.

It’s at that point that you make a terrible, impulsive decision. You can’t imagine that anything  _ human  _ will be able to help this. The man passes out again after only a few seconds of lucidity, and your mind is made up.

. . . 

A few minutes later, and there’s a nearly-dead something on the floor of your bathroom, breathing just barely with a staccato rhythm. You’re not quite sure why you moved him, why you didn’t just leave the man to someone who knew what they were doing. And yet, you have a feeling that whoever– no, whatever this person is, the police wouldn’t be able to help. 

The man was pathetically easy to move. Sickeningly, you realize that’s because of just how many pieces he’s missing. 

Disgustingly thankful that you live alone, you crouch down beside what almost amounts to a breathing corpse, trying not to gag at the sight of all the blood. The man is bigger than you (or at least he  _ was _ ), but unhealthily thin, pure lean muscle like you’ve never seen on a human. What you can see of his hair under the gore matting it is blond, long, but chopped off in places in an ugly, rough cut that probably wasn’t intentional. There’s something like a helmet on his head that you can’t believe hasn’t fallen off yet. 

Ever since you first touched him, he’s been making small, terrified noises, breathing like his body expects to be killed. You try to take it as a good sign. He’s alive, breathing, and that’s better than not. You breathe through your mouth and try to think of what to do next. 

Stopping the bleeding is probably a good idea. You grab towels, old shirts, and scissors, slicing the fabric into strips. Even if you did have regular bandages here, there’s no way it would be enough. 

You sit on the tile next to the man who’s bleeding a dark puddle onto your bathroom floor. First, you try to figure out where to start. Examining the man as well as you can without hurting him more, you try to find whatever wound looks most urgent. 

Both of his legs have been sawed off high on his thighs, messy, uneven wounds that look like they were made with some kind of massive blade. His right arm has been removed in a similar fashion, this time just above the elbow. All three wounds were nasty, raw things, clearly made do to do harm. None of them will heal well, no matter what you do. 

The man is wearing the tattered remains of some strange, white clothes. The fabric of them feels strange and artificial under your hand, even soaked with blood as they are. You cut what basically amounts to rags away from his body, swallowing nausea over just how much blood there is. It’s everywhere, soaking your hands and seeping into your nail beds. Underneath the bloodied clothes, you find a series of shallow gashes seemingly carved into the man’s chest, cut in patterns that have to be intentional. He’s bruised blue-black in painful looking splotches all over his skin, like he’s been beaten while he couldn’t fight back. 

Fortunately, the gashes aren’t deep. Most of the blood seems to be coming from the stumps (and worryingly, his head), and you’re about to move on to check that particular problem when you realize that what you thought was a bruise high on his chest is actually a  _ hole.  _

Another little scream almost leaves you. You bite down on it, just barely, mind racing. There’s nowhere near as much blood as you’d expect from a hole that deep, but no one– no one could survive that. 

The man heaves another breath, just to prove you wrong. 

Okay, you think, trying to keep breathing yourself, the hole isn’t fatal to whatever this man is. You force yourself to move on, reminding yourself that you have more important matters to deal with right now. Like blood loss. Yep, that’s pretty important. You bite your lip and switch your focus to the man’s head, parting blond hair with your fingers to try to find the source of all the blood. 

A quick tug reveals that the helmet thing is somehow  _ attached,  _ but that’s far from the weirdest thing you’ve found yet. On one side of his head, just high enough that the bone-like helmet is chipped on the edge, is a deep, bloody wound. It looks like he got knocked in the head, hard, and you wince. That’s not going to be good. You remember from earlier that he’s missing an eye, nothing more than an empty, bloody socket left behind. 

In short, it’s a mess, and you can barely think of where to start. 

But there isn’t time to worry. You have to do something, he isn’t going to be alive much longer. Deciding that the amputations are the first thing you should be worrying about, you take a couple strips of fabric and begin to knot them around the stumps of his thighs. You have no idea what to do to help an actual missing limb, but stopping the bleeding sounds like a probably good idea, especially considering just how much blood he’s already lost. 

The man keeps making these soft, wounded noises every time your fingers brush against the mangled tissue. The sound are barely human, more like some kind of pained animal. You’re absurdly thankful that he’s not awake to experience this. You doubt you’re exactly managing “gentle”. 

Once his legs have been bandaged as well as you can, you move onto his arm, trying to ignore how the fabric you knotted around his stumps is already going red. This will work. He’s not human. He’ll heal, somehow. 

You choke down your fears, and keep working. 

. . . 

What feels like an eternity later, you’re done. The man has been bandaged up to the best of your ability, and you hope, you  _ hope  _ that it will be enough. Your work discovered that every finger on his remaining hand is broken. That his jaw is pressing out against his skin at an odd angle. He’s messed up beyond what any human could survive. You’re certain. 

And yet, he’s still breathing. His chest is still heaving in a spasming, painful looking rhythm. His face has gone a sickly pale underneath all the blood, and he hasn’t woken up again yet, but he’s not getting any worse. 

Your bathroom floor is a disaster of gore and blood-soaked strips of cloth. You doubt it’ll ever be clean again. Images of raw, bloody stumps, sawed-off strips of muscle dangling at odd angles are seared into your mind. There’s blood embedded under your nails, into the cuticles, that feels like it may never come out. You’re honestly amazed that you haven’t vomited yet. 

Examining your work, all messy knots of cloth tied tightly around the nauseating stumps, half soaked through with blood already, you bite your lip. It’s messy. You’re no expert in first aid, much less anything this extreme. It will do. It has to. There’s no way you can take  _ whatever  _ this person is to a hospital, and, although it sickens you to think it, just giving him a quiet place to die might be the greatest kindness you can afford. You think of tubes shoved into him, men in white coats poking at his insides in the hopes of finding out why he’s still breathing, and shudder. 

Hospital isn’t an option. You’re going to have to fix this one yourself, or at least make him comfortable if the worst happens. 

The man looks pathetic, crumpled on the tile and missing so many pieces. On some sympathetic impulse, you go find some of your older blankets and towels, tucking something soft under his head so that his neck doesn’t lay at such an awkward angle, and spreading another one over him. 

They’re both blood-splotched within minutes, but at least he doesn’t look quite as miserable. As much as you’d rather have someone so injured in a bed, or at least propped up somewhere softer, you’re  _ not  _ moving him out of your bathroom. You at least want to pretend like you’ll be able to clean. Anyway, he’s unconscious, and compared to missing limbs, he probably won’t care too much about having to make do with a tile floor. 

You laugh shakily. It’s probably the shock talking, but there’s something almost amusing about having a mutilated not-human in your house, like you really though you could fix him with amature first aid and hope. You’re not even going to pretend like you expect him to make it through the night, and, with that sentiment, you lay another blanket over him. If this man is going to die here, you might as well make him as comfortable as you can. You sort of wish you could get some pain pills in him, but that would involve waking him up… if they’d work in the first place.

So you give up for the night. You set up your own pile of blankets just outside the bathroom, and pray that you’ll be able to hear if anything happens. Pray that his chest won’t be still in the morning. 

. . . 

You wake up to screaming. A sickly sound, like it’s sticking in someone’s throat. You jerk awake, coming back to reality too slowly. 

It takes a minute for you to remember what’s happened, what’s in the room just a few feet away, but when you do, it hits you in the gut like a bullet. You’re on your hands and knees in a second, rolling over and peering into the bathroom with panic, dread for what could have gone wrong. 

The man is awake, good eye open and unfocused. His probably-broken jaw is open at an odd angle, and a horrible, terrified almost-scream is leaving him like his ribcage is squeezing it out. He’s kicked the blankets off, somehow, and is back to writhing, squirming as much as his broken body will allow. His bandages are soaked through with red. 

When his eye lands on you, you can  _ see  _ the moment that he realizes you’re there. Every part of him tenses up at once, winding impossibly tighter. His scream fades into a low, panicked moan. His whole body shudders, shakes, jerking him like a caught thing, helpless not to squirm. It takes him a good moment to make himself move, but when he does, he’s curling up onto his side and in, hiding his stomach and throat like some kind of animal. If he still had limbs, you’d imagine they’d be tucking in close, shielding any vulnerable part of him from harm.

You can’t imagine how much pain he’s in right now. 

When you start to move, another, more violent noise is torn from his throat. His one eye looks at you like he’s seeing whatever did this to him. He slides in his own blood trying to get away from you, wriggling pathetically in the mess of gore surrounding him. You wince. It hurts to watch. 

Wetness soaks your knees when you crawl over next to him, a mixture of fresh and sticky blood clinging to your legs. The man makes a horrible, gurgling noise when you get close, one good eye blown black, bruised all around it. A second later, he figures out that he has a hand that sort of works, and starts trying to drag himself across the tile on broken fingers in a way that’s equally pathetic and painful to see. 

You don’t know what to do to fix this. The man’s chest is heaving fast and hard, drawing painful breaths that only grow faster when you get close. He’s terrified of you, even an idiot could see it. You don’t know how to make it stop. The room feels like it’s closing in on you, a heavy pressure grabbing hold of your chest and squeezing down, choking you under its weight. 

“I’m trying to help.” You sound unsure, even to your own ears, and the man flinches at your voice. “Please, please calm down, I can’t–” 

The man is still trying to drag himself with his broken hand. That’s the sight that changes your mind. Before you can stop yourself, you’re scooting over next to him, ignoring the panicked moan that slides out of his throat, the way his struggles only intensify. You take his hand in yours. His skin is colder than yours and sticky with blood, and he shudders like a dying thing as soon as you make contact. He probably thinks you’re going to take this arm off too, frightened as he is. You bite your lip, on the verge of panic. 

But instead of pulling away, you sit there, holding the man’s hand and forcing yourself to relax. It won’t help him if you panic too. Cradling shaking, broken fingers as gently as you can, you breathe deep and even. 

You don’t move. You don’t try to talk anymore. You just sit there as still as you can manage, holding his hand just tight enough to stop him from trying to crawl away. The man makes those sick, miserable little noises through all of it, squirming weakly like he wants to get away. 

“Shush. I’m helping you, silly thing,” you whisper when his shudders get worse, when his noises grow louder, more panicked. It occurs to you that you’re sitting in what amounts to a puddle of someone else’s blood, trying to comfort something that definitely isn’t human. You’d laugh if you weren’t so exhausted. 

. . .

You wake up to an aching back and the man passed out about a foot away. He’d worn himself out last night and fallen back to unconsciousness, and you hadn’t dared leave his side and let it happen again. 

So you’d spent the night on the floor, sitting propped up against your bathtub, sticky, drying blood coating your legs. Gross, you think, as if bandaging a set of fresh stumps the night before wasn’t  _ worse.  _ It’s light outside by now, probably some time in mid-morning, and, after checking that the man is thoroughly unconscious, you decide to take a shower. 

You leave the man where he lays, hoping that he’ll stay out for at least long enough for you to get cleaned up. Fortunately, he’s cooperative. You get the majority of the blood off of you as quickly as you can, tossing your ruined clothes in the trash without even a hope of getting them clean, and changing into something old and worn that won’t be missed. You feel worlds better clean. Even though nothing is fixed yet, it’s just  _ nice  _ to be a little less disgusting. Not that you have any hopes of that lasting. 

Once you’re done, you decide to tackle some of the mess in the bathroom– at least clean a place for you to sit. Mopping around the near-corpse on your floor is morbidly hilarious, at least until you remember him terrified and trying to escape on nothing but a broken hand. 

Then you just feel sort of sick. 

But you get done, to an extent where you can actually sit down, and try to pretend like things are normal… well, as normal as you can.

Plopping down on the floor across from him, you mess around on your laptop for a while, looking up funny things to take your mind off of the gruesome situation at hand. Cat videos are a pretty decent way of passing time, it turns out. The next time you look up, the man’s good eye is open. 

He’s staring at you with a quiet intensity that you’ve only seen out of large predators on TV. His chest is heaving rapid-fire, and his pupil is blown black and huge. You already have a guess that he’s not thinking clearly. 

Instead of moving, you stare right back, subtly tapping the pause button on your video and meeting his gaze. The man starts shaking about ten seconds in, but it’s still an improvement over the screaming from last night. He’s eyeing you like he expects to be gutted, and the tense, panicked expression etched across his features reminds you of something feral and dying. He reminds you of a wild animal, fearing for its life. 

“Um, hey?” you mumble eventually, trying to sound gentle. The man  _ flinches  _ at your words, curling in on himself like he’s actually afraid. 

Mentally cursing yourself, you go back to still and quiet. The man shakes with every breath. He’s staring at you like he expects to be killed, and yep, your heart is breaking. This man would have been bigger than you if he was still in one piece, and seeing him cower like a frightened rabbit is downright painful to watch. You close your eyes, and try to breathe. 

You don’t move. Minutes pass, and the man goes limp. You’re close to thinking it’s an improvement when he starts to sob, chest shaking with the effort of it. Around the time he starts whimpering what sounds like someone’s name, you feel like you’re going to throw up. 

You close your eyes and try to breathe. You can’t call the noises he’s making  _ crying.  _ He sounds broken, pained, so out of it that you can’t even make out what he’s trying to say, just that it’s someone’s name and that you desperately wish that someone was here right now to fix this. 

He keeps sobbing, seemingly choking on his own breath for what feels like forever, and eventually, you can’t take another second of it. 

“Okay,” you say, voice as even and calm as you can make it. 

The man flinches, spasms, curls up with all of his stumps and goes silent save for his own wheezing breath. You bite your lip until you taste blood. He thinks he’s going to die. You know it, and it  _ hurts.  _

“Okay,” again, more to comfort yourself than anything, “I’m not gonna hurt you. It’s okay.” You ease yourself onto your knees setting your laptop aside. The man’s breath quickens, a miserable little moan leaving him. You try not to feel nauseous, and force yourself to keep going. 

Crawling slowly, you scoot yourself towards him. As soon as he realizes you’re moving, he’s back to writhing, trying to scramble away from you with limbs that don’t exist anymore. His injured hand claws at the tile, but he can’t get a grip. He’s left shaking, jerking, breathing a triple-time rhythm that sounds like what panic itself feels in someone’s chest. You plop yourself down about a foot away from him. 

“Come on. I know it hurts. I won’t make it any worse. I’m here to help you, not make anything hurt more. It’s okay. You’re okay. You can breathe, come on.” Muttering comforting nonsense, you sit and wait. 

It feels like an eternity, but the man’s breathing slows to something almost controlled. His eye never leaves you, but he goes from tense and squirming to shuddering limpness. It’s an improvement, no matter how small, and, well, it’s not like he’s started screaming again. You sit there and keep talking, repeating the same phrases over in nonsense patterns. 

When the man speaks, it’s with a rough, raspy voice that sounds like blood is stuck to the inside of his throat. He’s so quiet that you almost don’t hear him, but what he says makes your chest go cold. 

“Wh-when… when are y-you… gonna kill me…?”

He’s shaking so badly that you can hear his teeth chattering, wide-eyed and staring up at you from the floor. 

You swallow, hard, and try not to be sick then and there. 

“I’m not going to.” It’s pathetic, but it’s all you can say. Your own throat feels glued shut with disgust, the sick feeling rolling hard against the pit of your stomach. He can talk. He’s human enough to talk, and the first coherent words he gets out are expecting you to kill him. 

The man’s eye slides shut for a long second. His fingers clench against the floor weakly, broken digits struggling to move how they should. 

“You’re… a h-human…” he stutters, breathing hard. 

“Yep. Uh-huh. Totally, completely human.” You’re not sure what the alternative is, but you’re getting the feeling it’s not good. 

“…hurts… ” he mutters, groaning and trying to curl up again. He’s definitely not lucid right now. Considering how panicked he was the last few times he was awake, you feel like that might be a blessing. 

“You’re going to hurt for a while, I bet. Um, do you know if you can heal from this? Like, at all? I mean, I’m already pretty impressed that you’re not dead, but is any of this going to get better for you?” You don’t know if that many words are going to make sense to him right now, but you’re tired, he’s at least not screaming, and it feels like a decent time to ask. 

The man shivers, jaw tensing. You notice that it’s gotten awfully swollen, confirming your guess that it’s broken. He breathes like a death rattle, chest shaking and fingers still clawing at the tile. A soft, whimpering sound is escaping him, probably involuntary. It feels like a stab to the chest, and you wince again. He’s miserable. You can’t imagine how much pain he’s in, all raw, open wounds and bruised-black skin. 

On impulse, you grab the (admittedly sort of bloody) blankets from before, spreading one over him before he can flinch away. 

His eye goes very, very wide. He looks at you with some panicked expression that you’re glad you can’t place. Squirming just a bit, as if trying to figure out what’s on top of him, he grabs at the blanket with his good hand, running the softness through his fingers experimentally. 

“What… What’s th-this for…?” he asks, eyeing you like you’ve just handed him some kind of trap. Your heart breaks all over again. 

“Do you not have blankets… uh, wherever you’re from?” Just because of how confused he looks, you tuck the other one around him too. That kind of face in response to  _ blankets  _ is just wrong. 

“‘s soft…” He actually starts  _ nuzzling  _ at the blanket a moment later, eye sliding closed. A blood-crusted blanket giving someone that much comfort is just pathetic, and you try not to say anything. Let him have this. After everything he’s been through so far…

You think you’re going to get him more blankets. 

“Do you have a name?” you ask, just to change the subject. Watching the look of barely disguised bliss on his face as he nuzzles at the fabric around his head is starting to hurt. “Or, um, what are you?”

“Yylfordt,” he mumbles, after a moment of thought. “Doesn’t matter…  wh-what I am. You’re g-gonna kill me…. soon ‘nough. While I… I c-can’t fight back…” It’s the most words you’ve gotten out of him yet, but yep, okay, your chest is definitely hurting right now. He thinks you’re going to kill him. He actually thinks he’s going to die in a bloody little bathroom with nothing but a nasty blanket for comfort. Your heart is actually breaking. 

“Nope. Definitely not going to kill you. Ever. You know what? Let’s talk about something else. Like water. You probably need to get some water in you, yep, that’s a good place to start. Here, let’s think about water.” You know you’re rambling. You really don’t know what else to do. Leaning up to grab a cup from beside your sink, you fill it with cool water, trying to ignore the way the man flinches at the sound. Whatever he is, he hasn’t drank anything in a while, and water definitely can’t hurt. 

You scoot a little closer to Yylfordt, pointedly ignoring the way his breathing picks up again when you get close. Well aware that he’s not going to be able to hold the cup for himself, you falter. He’s terrified of you. You’re not sure how you’re going to do this without scaring him more. 

“Okay, um, I’m going to help you sit up, alright? I won’t hurt you. It’s just so you can drink something without, like, choking.” Yylfordt doesn’t say anything, just looks at you like he doesn’t believe you for a second. 

Hoping that he won’t panic, you set the cup down beside you. You slide an arm under Yylfordt’s shoulders as gently as you can, pointedly ignoring the terrified little moan that leaves him at the contact. His good eye squinches shut when you move him, probably from pain. You can’t imagine that  _ anything  _ feels very good, as torn up as he is, and you’re not pretending that you’re not agitating some bruises by moving him. 

But you get him somewhat upright. Yylfordt doesn’t try to struggle, and he doesn’t start screaming again. He’s breathing like he’s so scared he can’t get enough air, but that’s, that’s just something that you have to deal with. He pulls his good arm over his stomach, obviously trying to cover up anything delicate, and you try not to show how sick that makes you feel. 

You pull the blankets back up over him. Blankets are good. Maybe that will make him feel a little bit more safe.

Yylfordt looks at you like you’ve done something incomprehensible. You try not to think about how  _ sad  _ that is. You pick up the cup again, reminding yourself to stay calm, and bring it to his lips. 

The first splash of water against his lips makes Yylfordt’s good eye go pathetically wide. He makes a soft, confused noise, body shaking so badly that it’s hard to keep the cup still. He drinks, gulping down water faster than you’d imagine would be good for him. You can’t bring yourself to stop him. 

When you pull the cup away, there’s a dribble of water running down his swollen chin. His one eye is wide, painfully confused. He’s shuddering, shoulders trembling miserably. 

“Um, was that okay?” you ask, almost dreading the answer. 

Yylfordt eyes the empty cup with visible desperation. He doesn’t say anything, but you have a pretty good guess of what he’s thinking. 

You refill the cup. 

After three cups of water and one apology for not wanting to risk giving him more, you are thoroughly horrified by whatever this man is. Between the incident with the blanket and  _ this,  _ you’re starting to feel sick. 

But Yylfordt isn’t looking at you with quite as much terror now. His eye is starting to go unfocused, and yeah, he’s probably exhausted, but that’s a massive improvement over panic every time you get close. He let you help him with the water without struggling. His breathing is back to something almost normal. You’re definitely counting all of that as progress. 

. . . 

He sleeps for a long time, after that. A couple times, you check the bandages, change them out for fresh ones. His stumps are already beginning to heal, skin growing in over the raw, open wounds little by little. At this point, it doesn’t really shock you. You’re not sure what would. 

One time, you dare to leave the house, hoping that Yylfordt won’t wake up alone. You buy soft, easy foods that won’t upset even the most sensitive stomach. You’re not sure how long it’s been since he ate, but you are sure that getting something in him will be a good idea. You buy real bandages, the fluffiest blankets you can find, and a small heater. Judging from his reaction to a gross, bloody blanket, you really don’t think you can go wrong with more soft things.

Back at home, Yylfordt hasn’t moved. Whether he’s asleep or unconscious, you’re thankful that he’s not awake to hurt. He looks almost peaceful like this, save for the ugly bruises painting his skin. 

Again, you grab your laptop, sitting down next to him and entertaining yourself with dumb videos and cute animals until Yylfordt stirs beside you. 

After a while, his breathing picks up, going back to something ragged and panicked. You see him start to shake again, see his broken hand curl against the tile in something close to panic all over again. 

“Just me,” you murmur, closing your laptop and reminding yourself not to touch him. “Human, remember? I’m not going to hurt you. You’re safe. Breathe, it’s okay, nothing’s going to hurt you.” You sit there, mumbling nonsense until he stills. Yylfordt’s pupil is still blown black, and you still doubt he’s entirely lucid, but there’s an awareness in his gaze that wasn’t there before. Improvement, you remind yourself. He’s healing. 

“Quit talkin’ down to me…” he slurs. It’s painfully obvious that he’s trying not to be afraid. “No… n-no  _ human  _ is going to sc-scare me.” There’s something defensive, almost prideful in his voice that wasn’t there before, cutting through the pain that thickens his tone. You don’t like it. 

“Of course not. Speaking of which, I think it’s about time I get an explanation. You’re not human, so what are you?” He seems to be able to talk well enough, and it’s about time you get an answer.

“I’m a H-Hollow…” Yylfordt says, voice trembling with every little shudder that wracks him. Yep. That makes a lot of sense. 

“Okay, Hollow, got it. Mind telling the dumb human what a Hollow is?”

Yylfordt makes a good attempt at giving you a condescending look. He explains, though, and between the slurred words and trailing off sentences of someone who’s barely lucid, you somehow get the idea. Hollows, apparently, are souls. Not physical creatures, which kind of explains how he’s healing so fast. He’s one of the stronger Hollows, Yylfordt says, with no small amount of pride in his voice, one of the survivors. And he’s one of the ones who doesn’t belong in a place as pathetic as the human world. 

You let him have that bit of pride. For someone who’s missing the majority of their limbs, and will never be able to fight again, you think you can let it slide that he’s being sort of a brat. 

“So, when do you think you’ll be less… bloody? You said you can heal and stuff, and I feel really bad just keeping you in the bathroom, so whenever it’s, uh, safe to move you somewhere nicer, I think that would be a good idea,” you ask. A bed or a couch would be a  _ major  _ improvement. 

The look that Yylfordt gives you tells that it’s a good thing he’s only half conscious. You think you’ll forgive yourself for damaging his pride. 

“Fuck… Uh… ‘nother day or two…?” he mumbles, shifting his ruined limbs. A slow look of horror slides across his face, as if he’s seeing the extent of the damage for the first time. “Th-These… these aren’t gonna heal…” Shuddering, his broken fingers fly to the stump of his arm, squeezing roughly at the bandages. “They’re.. they’re g-gone…”

Yylfordt is starting to panic again. You can see it in his eye, the look of terror that’s slipping back into place. His breathing picks up. He curls in on himself, trying to hide all over again, as if you’re somehow a  _ threat.  _

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. Let’s not think about that. How about blankets? I got you some new ones today. Fluffy ones, that are way nicer than these bloody things. I got you food too, good things that won’t make you sick. Here, I’m going to go get you a blanket now, okay?” Somehow, it’s easy to slip into a now-familiar pattern of gentle rambling. If it eases the panicked look etched across his bruised face, you don’t think you care. 

You get up, grabbing a blanket from the other room as quickly as you can. Plopping back down, you gently take Yylfordt’s remaining hand, easing it away from his stump– squeezing, much too tightly– and bring it to the blanket, a ridiculously soft thing, made of multi-colored wool. 

“Why… what’s th-this for?” he mutters, confusion thick in his voice. 

“It’s for you. It’s cold back here, and you liked the last ones, so I got you more blankets. There are four of them, and they’re yours now.” With those words, you tug away the old, bloody blankets, replacing them with the new one. You tuck it in around his thin shoulders, around the stump of his missing arm, and pretend not to notice how he shivers. 

Yylfordt is silent while you get the next three, arranging them around him in a comfortable nest on the floor. His expression is unreadable, something almost vulnerable sliding over his tense features. 

“There. That’s better,” you say emphatically. “And if you want more, tell me. Tile is really fucking cold, and I’ll get you all the blankets you want.” 

Making a soft noise low in his throat, Yylfordt shifts. You realize, after a moment, that he’s trying not to burrow down into them like some kind of animal. Something in your heart  _ hurts.  _

You ignore it. You retreat to the kitchen with a smile that’s braver than you feel, and find something for Yylfordt to eat. You have no idea how long it’s been since he’s gotten anything in him other than water. Judging from how he reacted to said water, you’re caught between dreading his reaction to real food and being determined to make sure he gets good things now. 

You settle on milk mixed with some sweet, vanilla-flavored nutritional powder that seems like a good place to start. He took liquids well enough already, and you really do want to get him to eat something decent. 

When you get back to the bathroom, Yylfordt has successfully wormed his way deeper into the blanket pile, breathing slow and steady under the softness around him. Both of his eyes are closed, and his bruised, swollen face looks almost peaceful. His eyelid flutters when you get close, gaze landing on you with a look that’s almost relaxed. Progress, you remind yourself. He’s going to figure out that you don’t intend to hurt him. 

Once again, you help him sit up, trying to ignore the almost  _ vulnerable  _ look bleeding through his fear. 

“I want you to drink this. It’s milk and vanilla, if you know what either of those things are. It’s good for you, and should taste pretty amazing. Go slow, please. Don’t make yourself sick.” You raise the straw to Yylfordt’s bruised mouth, and he obeys, too tired to do anything else. 

An actual  _ whimper  _ leaves him as soon as the liquid hits his tongue. His eye goes painfully wide, and he swallows so hard you can hear it. His tongue flickers out, a flash of pink licking over his lips in one quick swipe. 

“Wh-What  _ is  _ that,” he whines, eyeing the glass with desperation. “I thought… you w-were gonna… poison me or some shit, n-not…  _ that. _ ” His good hand slides out from under the blankets, pawing at your arm with broken fingers, a rawness in his voice that you don’t want to examine. You take a deep breath. You struggle not to show how much this hurts to watch. 

“Not gonna hurt you,” you say again, because it needs to be said. 

“It’s milk, the sweet kind. You can have all of this, and there will be more once I know it won’t make you sick. I won’t take it away.” Your free hand, on impulse goes to his, stroking over the bruised, broken fingers, pulling them away from your wrist with care not to cause pain. 

Yylfordt sucks in a little gasp at the brush of your skin on his, good eye going impossibly wider. His shoulders shake, ever so faintly.

You bring the straw back to his mouth without another word. 

. . . 

That evening, Yylfordt sleeps again, passing out mere minutes after drinking what you gave him. He wakes up growling, cursing at you and struggling with what remains of his limbs. 

You can see the awareness in his eyes. For the first time, he’s fully awake. His gaze flickers back and forth from you to his bandaged, bloody stumps. He grows more panicked every time he looks, voice rising to a vicious howl, soaked in what you recognize as utter terror. 

He throws his blankets at you with his good hand, tries to hit you a moment later. He insists that it’s  _ your  _ fault he’s in this state. 

You sit beside him, quiet. He’s afraid. You can see it clearly, and you aren’t going to let a bit of anger stop you from trying to help.

“I hope you die!” he screeches. “Damn it! I’d never want some worthless fucking  _ human  _ messing with me! You should have left me to die. I’d hate you less if you did!” All the while, he’s growling like an animal, squirming pathetically as he tries to get enough leverage to lash out at you. One particularly quick jerk, and he’s knocking his mask, as he said it was called, on the edge of the bathtub with a sick-sounding clatter. 

Yylfordt howls, curling in on himself, hand flying up to the point of impact. You wouldn’t have expected something like that to have nerves in it, but you’re not surprised by very much at this point. 

“See, you’re going to hurt yourself,” you say, trying sound soothing. “Can we calm down now, please?” You lean in and gently pull away his hand, feeling the edge of the mask for any cracks or chips. 

At the first brush of contact, his breath catches hard in his chest, a shudder working through him like a wave. He  _ wheezes  _ like a dying thing, shaking under the touch. A stroke of your thumb over the lip of his mask, and he whines, voice a high, desperate sound. Okay, you think, the bone cool under your fingers, there’s definitely feeling in that. 

The anger seeps out of him almost instantly, replaced with some fragile peace that feels close to terror. His hand falls limp against the tile, jaw going slack when you don’t let the contact end. 

“D-Damn it…” he mutters, hissing out miserable little swears. 

Gently, carefully, you run your fingers over the chipped edge of bone. Yylfordt’s breath leaves him in a rush. He’s shaking, shoulders trembling under even so little contact. Another moment passes. Your fingers brush over the raised edge of the mask. A soft, even noise has started up, you realize, and a second later, that it’s coming from Yylfordt. 

It takes you a minute to make sense of it, but the realization hits you hard. He’s  _ purring,  _ actually purring, like the animal you keep mentally comparing him to. It doesn’t sound quite like a cat, but the sound is definitely not anything a human could make.

Yylfordt’s good eye is glazed, unfocused. His broken, bruised face is tucked against the ground, jaw slack. The purr that’s coming out of him is rough and cracked, like it hasn’t been used in far too long. 

When he tries to curl in on himself again, head pressing against your thigh, you switch to running your fingers through his hair. His purr  _ throbs  _ when you scratch at his scalp, so hard you can feel it in your nails. Yylfordt isn’t even trying to make words anymore, just heaving aching little sighs, and shaking like he’s going to fall apart. It’s an improvement over screaming at you and insisting you should have killed him, you think, and decide that petting him for a while isn’t the worst thing you could do. 

You sit there for a while, just running your fingers through his hair, over his mask. Yylfordt purrs and purrs, practically shaking. He’s limp against the tile, fingers splayed against the cool ground. You discover that he purrs the hardest when you trace soft lines over his forehead, touch unbearably tender. You learn what his features look like when relaxed. 

The entire moment feels fragile somehow, like you’re doing so much more than just playing with his hair. 

Yylfordt quit trying to make words a while ago. Now, he’s just laying there, taking the attention with a shivery sort of vulnerability that makes your heart ache. You think you might be making progress.

. . . 

You wind up sitting with Yylfordt all night. You stop petting him eventually, allowing whatever trance you’ve worked him into to wear off.

When he finally blinks up at you with something like awareness in his eye, you scoot back, crawling over to the other side of the room to grab the blankets he threw at you last night, when he was still angry. 

“Here. I think you’ll want these.” One by one, you tuck the blankets in around Yylfordt again, this time giving him more room to burrow and hide. His eye goes very wide when you make sure to wrap the softest one closest to his skin. He squirms, just a bit, breathing against the softness like he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. 

“So, care to tell me what that was last night?” When you have Yylfordt wrapped up into a decent blanket pile, you lean back against the edge of the tub and wait for his answer. He turns away from you, ducking his face down into the blankets like he doesn’t want to face saying the answer. 

“...f’ck if I know…” he mutters at last, refusing to look at you. 

“Was it a Hollow thing?” You’re pressing, you know it, but you want an answer. Your houseguest turned from pure rage to purring into your hands with little more than some petting. That kind of requires an answer. 

“No!” Yylfordt yelps. “No d-dignified Hollow would ever want to be…  _ p-petted. _ ” He says the words like they’re shameful, still hiding against the blankets. “We d-don’t need to be coddled. It’s you stupid humans who thrive off of dumb shit like touching.” When he turns to glare at you, just briefly, you don’t miss the way his gaze flickers to your hands. 

The pieces of this little mystery are falling together quickly, and you don’t like the picture they’re making. 

There’s something almost fearful in Yylfordt’s good eye. You’re not sure you can face it yet. You’re not sure you want to. The man is traumatized, in so many more ways than the injuries you can see. You’re starting to think that you  _ should  _ be petting him again. 

“I had something for you,” you say, changing the subject before either of you can dig yourself any deeper. A quick run to the living room produces the little heater you’d bought earlier, much to Yylfordt’s confusion. 

“Wh-what’s that?” he asks, looking somewhere between mystified and still annoyed, staring at the heater like it might lash out and bite him. 

“Just wait a minute.” You’re sort of dreading his reaction at this point, but you plug in the heater anyway, turn it up to a medium setting, and angle it towards the blanket lump on the floor. It heats up quickly, and within a few moments, there’s a steady stream of warm air on Yylfordt. 

For just a moment, he stares at the heater with a look of utter confusion, blinking a couple times in bafflement. Then, the tension starts to bleed out of him. His head falls back to the floor, and you can see him start to curl up, some instinct driving him to worm his way deeper into the blanket pile until there’s blonde hair sticking out at odd angles from the little nest, his face all but hidden. 

“ _ Shut up, _ ” he hisses, when you try to ask if it feels good. A second later, he whines, high and soft. The dichotomy is astounding, but you have a pretty good feeling as to which side of his behavior is going to win. 

You know that Yylfordt is still in pain. His features are pulled tight in a way that very clearly says  _ hurt.  _ His stumps, while improving, are still raw and red, open skin not yet healed enough to protect the flayed nerves. You haven’t done anything for him but bandage things and hope. 

He’s still afraid of you. When you scoot closer a bit too suddenly, he flinches again, going tense as his good eye flies open, breath starting to come quickly all over again. You can’t imagine how vulnerable he feels, how torturous that kind of helplessness has to be for a creature that you’re quickly learning has only ever experienced pain. 

“Is it okay if I touch you again?” you ask when you get close enough, gesturing at his head. Yylfordt’s swollen jaw twitches, but he doesn’t say no.

“I want to. I won’t hurt you. It’ll be just the same as last night. You can relax for a while, and be all warm, okay? It won’t be bad.” You’re doing the rambling thing again, but it seems to be working. The malice in Yylfordt’s gaze softens, turning to something almost like want. 

He doesn’t say anything, just turns his head away from you tensely. 

“Thank you,” you say, not missing the way he shivers. Your fingers go to his forehead, beyond the edge of one of the nastier bruises, and stroke. 

His skin is cool and dry, his hair coarse and thick, and when you comb your fingers through the tangled mess of blonde, Yylfordt makes a soft noise into the part of the blanket nest covering his head. 

You spend a few minutes like that, drawing your fingers from his forehead up to his scalp, more petting than trying to untangle the knots. Yylfordt shudders a bit every time you brush against the smooth white of his mask, and you can see him biting his lip. The room is getting warmer, the blankets are soft against his skin, and you watch as the tension bleeds out of his expression drop by stubborn drop. You’re not doing much more than petting him, and Yylfordt is still acting like you’re taking him apart. 

It takes a while longer, like he’s purposely choking it down, but the purr starts up again. It’s just as rough as last time, stil cracked and painful. You scritch at his scalp, just to hear him whine at the touch. 

Yylfordt’s purr only gets louder the longer you sit there. His good hand is clutching like the blankets like a lifeline, digging into the fabric. 

“I take it the purr is a good thing?” you ask, and Yylfort  _ whines.  _

“D-Don’t… d-don’t ask me th-that…” he moans, sounding almost pained. You press, ask why not, and he shudders like a dying thing. “F-Fuck.. it’s… i-it’s, I c-can’t stop it. D-Damn it, q-quit… mocking m-me.”

“Not mocking you.” A reply, and he shakes all the more. On some strange impulse, you lean down, press a soft little kiss to his forehead. “I want you to feel better.” It’s not romantic, but tender, careful. You feel more protective than anything, like all you want is to see him happy. You already hate that he’s gone so long without good things in the first place.

The gentleness seems to shake something loose in Yylfordt. His purr rattles  _ hard,  _ painfully unsteady. He makes a miserable noise into the blankets, and swears, shaking harder than ever at the touch. 

A thought occurs to you, a minute later. 

“Hey, can you tell if you’ve healed any more? It’d probably be a good idea to get you cleaned up, if you don’t think it would agitate anything.” You kind of want to see what would happen if you got Yylfordt in a warm bath. You’re also kind of afraid of how he’d react to that. 

“It’d be f-fine…” Yylfordt mutters, struggling to talk through the purr. “‘m not… g-gonna bleed out or nothin’… Fuck, just do wh-what you want.” He’s back to shaking, shuddering like he’s going to fall apart. 

On some instinct, he tucks his face into the blankets, purr still rattling through his throat. It’s like he wants to hide, make himself small. 

It kind of hurts to do it, but you start to work him out of the blanket nest. Yylfordt whines in protest when you pull each blanket away, trying to curl up small with the stumps of limbs he has left. His shivers get worse, and you resist the urge to run a comforting hand over his shoulders, or something equally risky with how nervous he is. 

The next step is getting the bandages off. Yylfordt’s breath quickens when you get near his stumps, and his purr takes on a frantic tone, but he doesn’t struggle. You’re pleased to see that the wounds seem to be healing. They’re almost completely grown over with scabs, with places of pink, fresh skin. It’s worlds better than the first night, and you thank the mystery that is Hollow healing for making this kind of recovery possible. 

“Gonna lift you now. You’re going right into the bathtub there, so it’ll just be for a second.” You give him warning before you lean in close, lifting his worryingly light body just the same as you did back on the first night. 

Yylfordt’s breath catches in his chest when you lift him, purr stuttering. His good hand digs into your shoulder so tightly it hurts. 

But just as quickly, he’s in the bathtub. No major panic is a good thing, you think, even if his eye is scrunched tight with some kind of terror. You give him another warning that you’re about to turn the water on, to tell you if it’s too cold, then twist the knobs up to a comfortably warm setting.

The first splash of water makes Yylfordt jolt. He swears, squirming a bit like he wants to get away. You’re mumbling soothing reassurances before you can stop yourself, even when he bites curses at you for trying. 

You stick a hand under the stream of water, checking how warm it is. Between the steam slowly rising and the still running heater in the background, the room is getting rather warm. Yylfordt seems to be enjoying it, though, his shoulders relaxing incrementally in the heat. He sighs, once, and his purr starts up again, a bit more shaky than it was before. 

Soap is probably a bad idea, with all of his raw wounds. You think that just getting the blood off of him will be a good idea for now. That much touching will probably be all that Yylfordt can handle, anyway. 

So you wet a washcloth under the stream of warm water. The bathtub is starting fill, warmth lapping around the ends of Yylfordt’s stumps.

“I’m just going to try to get the blood off, okay? You’ll probably feel better when you aren’t all sticky, right?” Yylfordt doesn’t protest. “I’m going to have to touch you quite a bit, but I promise I’ll be gentle. You can tell me if anything hurts, and I’ll stop. I don’t want to hurt you. We’re just getting you clean.” He’s not looking at you. He’s stopped shivering, and his purr is still going strong, but it’s obvious that he doesn’t like what’s happening. 

You’re just going to have to change that. 

You start with his good arm. Every part of Yylfordt is bloody and gross, dried blood already starting to loosen in the steam. You run the washcloth down his skin, as gently as you can manage. 

Yylfordt’s breath catches in his chest, sharp. His gaze flickers over to what you’re doing, something like panic in his eye. 

Working from his shoulder down, you work off the dried blood, pausing every so often to rinse the washcloth. By the time you make it to his hand, Yylfordt is purring so loud you can feel it, shock evident in his eye. You take his healing fingers in yours, careful, and wipe the blood off his skin. A shocked little noise leaves him at the contact, something vulnerable and small. His fingers twitch, but he doesn’t do anything to pull away. 

When you’re done, you run your fingers over the back of his hand just because you can. The sound this earns you is nothing short of a whimper. 

From there, you wash the stump of his other arm, his chest and back, then, oh-so-carefully, the raw stumps of his legs. Yylfordt makes a little sound of panic when you touch his stomach, purr going sharp and frantic, but you whisper soothing sounds until the terror eases. 

You make sure to avoid the hole in his chest. You haven’t so much as tried to touch that yet, and you’re more than a little afraid to. 

You have to drain and fill the bathtub three times to get all of the blood rinsed out, but by the end of it, Yylfordt is remarkably more clean. His skin is tanned and smooth, cooler than yours, and scarred all over. You can’t imagine what his life up until now has been like, what could have caused every scar. A part of you is glad he’ll never be able to go back. 

“Okay, that’s better. Hair and face are all that’s left. It’s okay if I wash your hair, right?” The only answer you get is a slurred little noise. Yylfordt has been going progressively more limp since you started, seemingly melted by the combination of warmth and touch. 

He’s still purring, loud and deep, even after his gaze went glassy and unfocused. You get the feeling that you’ve triggered some kind of Hollow bliss mode, that Yylfordt himself might not be aware of how. 

“Th’s fine…” he mumbles. “Do what you want…”

First, you get a fresh wash cloth. 

You get the shower head down, turn a stream of warmth onto Yylfordt’s hair. The heat draws another little moan out of him, the noise going sharper when it hits his mask. His purr  _ throbs,  _ low and rumbling deep in his chest. You’re starting to wonder if this is going to break him. 

You get the fingers of one hand in his hair, rubbing at his scalp and working at the first of the nasty, matted tangles. 

Yylfordt makes a noise like he’s dying, head arching back into your hands. You turn the temperature of the water up a bit, just to see him go all the more limp at the warmth. 

It takes a long time to work out the matts of blood, the knots that seem like he hasn’t so much as tried to brush his hair in years, but you’re patient. Yylfordt purrs and purrs, cracked rumble going unsteady and frantic with every moment you spend combing through his hair. You work slowly, wanting to draw out this relaxation for him for as long as you can. 

And then, you’re done. Your fingers slide through his chopped off hair, and you’re really just petting him now, not cleaning. Yylfordt appears to have become a Hollow puddle in the bathtub, sunk up to his chest in warm water, eyes closed and face the most relaxed you’ve ever seen him. 

“Hey, we’re done.” You shake his shoulder a bit, just until his eye flutters open. “You did great. This should feel a  _ lot  _ better.”

Just because you can, you kiss his forehead again, delighting in the little gasp it draws from him. Yylfordt tries to curl up a bit, obviously half-dizzy with pleasure. From what you’ve figured out about Hollow life, you can’t imagine what so much touching, so much warmth feels like.

You drain the water. You lift Yylfordt up out of the bathtub, not commenting on how he nuzzles at your shoulder. 

You place him back in the blanket pile, tucking them around him until he’s as buried as he seems to like to be. It’s warm enough in the room that you’re not too worried about him getting chilled from wet hair, and you doubt he could handle much more touching anyway. Yylfordt shivers the whole time, still purring. He squirms his way into the blankets, looking absolutely blissed out like he’s not aware of anything but how good he feels. 

“Was that too terrible?” you ask, sort of teasing. 

Yylfordt makes a little huff of a noise, wriggles a bit like he can’t form words. You poke his shoulder, and he twitches.  

“F’ck off,” he finally manages, and you can’t help but laugh. 

. . . 

The next couple days pass easily. Yylfordt won’t look at you for two of them, face going an admittedly adorable shade of red every time you try to talk to him. He appears to be downright humiliated by his behavior earlier, and you don’t press. It won’t hurt to let him figure it out on his own. 

But time passes, and he starts to relax. You manage to move him to a guest room, to an actual bed when his stumps have mostly healed over. 

Yylfordt seems to be delighted by having an actual bed. You get him lots of blankets, because what kind of heartless person would you be if you  _ didn’t  _ get him blankets at this point? Yylfordt gets a little nest all his own, with the heater a permanent feature beside his bed. You get an actual smile out of him, a weak and hesitant thing, when you bring the heater back. He admits, mumbling, that he didn’t think you’d bother to keep spoiling him. 

Just for that, you make sure to give him  _ extra  _ spoiling. You bring him soft, easy foods, feed him even after you both know his fingers have healed. Yylfordt makes little protests every time, but doesn’t struggle. 

You both are becoming aware that he needs the attention. 

Something about the day you got him cleaned up changed things. Yylfordt looks at you differently now, less like you’re some kind of threat that will do him harm at any second, and more like you’re someone to be trusted. You imagine it’s a Hollow thing, some instinct affecting him. 

Neither of you comment on it. Yylfordt’s pride probably couldn’t take it. He still makes sure to remind you that he’s only  _ tolerating  _ a human taking care of him because he has to. You don’t argue. 

He’s relaxed. He lets you touch him sometimes, run fingers through his hand or over the back of his hands. He seems to need the contact terribly, and you’re far from one to refuse him now. 

. . . 

In less than a week, the next measure of progress comes. 

Yylfordt has nightmares every time he sleeps. Violent terrors of dreams that leave him shaken and skittish. He wakes up in some vicious mood more often than not, lashing out at you before he remembers where he is, who you are. 

He’s scared and you both know it. Those moments of temper are fueled by some residual terror that’s deeper than either of you want to face. He yells at you around once a day, screaming at you to go die, to kill him, to do anything to make his misery end. As soon as he’s calm, it’s back to seeking your attention like a greedy cat, purring when you touch him and drowsing off under your hands. The dichotomy is astounding.

Once, Yylfordt calls himself a broken thing, hissing curses with a wild look in his one eye. His voice cracks as he demands to know why you’ve ever kept him. 

Why you’ve been so kind to something that can’t fight. 

You don’t say anything. Yylfordt wears himself out soon enough, and is back asleep, squirming fitfully under the hands of a new dream. All he does is eat and rest. You think that may be part of how he heals so rapidly. 

Later, Yylfordt is back to calm and soft, wrapped up in blankets and half asleep yet again. You don’t know when he’ll be back to panicked fury. You’re not sure if  _ he  _ knows. You’re starting to accept that this is just what it’s like to deal with him, that for every step you take forwards, you’ll find another layer of scars and barbed wire wrapped tight and sharp. 

He’s looking at you, eye lidded and body lax. His hand is in yours, cool, crooked fingers curled softly against your skin. 

“Hollows aren’t meant for this,” he mutters, voice a soft rumble. You ask what he means, scoot close enough to brush a bit of hair out of his face. “ _ That.  _ ‘m ruined. You should have put me down while you had the chance. And– And all you do is, is–” His voice cracks, heavy with shame. 

“Be nice to you? Yep, and I’m going to keep doing it.” The only thing you really can do is shut down those thoughts before they get too far. 

“...Yeah,” Yylfordt says after a moment. His eye flutters closed, and he breathes out, steady and slow. Fingers twitch against yours, almost squeezing. “You’re warm… ‘s nice. Stay here?” He’s not looking at you, but that’s as close to an open invitation to be close to him as you’ve gotten. Yylfordt squirms just a bit, obviously trying not to say something. You make a guess and move to sit beside him, leaving any comments unsaid. 

A second later, and Yylfordt’s good arm pulls you down beside him. He’s stronger than you, even missing most of his limbs. You think he could probably tear you apart if he wanted to. You move easily. 

His face is red when he buries it against your shoulder, shaking hard enough that you can feel it. Never once has Yylfordt initiated any kind of contact between you. This is new territory. You don’t know if Yylfordt himself knows what he’s doing at this point. 

Breathing steady and slow, Yylfordt slides his good arm more comfortably around your waist. He’s never done this before, it’s obvious. His grip is unsure and a little bit painful, like he doesn’t know how to touch anyone without hurting them. His shoulders are broad, his body all wide strength, but you can feel the blunt edges of his stumps. He’s right. He’s been ruined for anything his previous world would have wanted him for. 

You put a hand on his back, rubbing little circles. Yylfordt makes a sound like he’s dying, and presses his face closer to your skin. He mumbles something about ‘warm’ and ‘good’, and a second later, goes stiff. 

“Wh-What’s that…?” You’re about to ask what he’s talking about, when he brings his fingers to your chest, a bit to the left. 

You realize that you’ve never noticed his own heartbeat before. 

A second later, that you can’t feel it even now. 

“Hollow don’t have heartbeats?” you ask. Yylfordt’s head falls back to your chest, eye going glazed and distant. 

“We’re–” he sucks in a shudder of a breath, “That’s the  _ point.  _ Hollows are heartless. When we die as, as humans, we lose it. Never… never heard one before.” 

That’s definitely something he left out when he told you what a Hollow was. He’s human. Was human. This prickly, broken mess of a creature that doesn’t understand why you’d be kind to him when he can’t fight was _human._ You think you feel about a second away from crying. 

You squeeze Yylfordt a little tighter instead. He twitches at the contact, head ducking down to hide a bit closer to you. His hair is in your face, coarse and tickling. His hand slowly finds its way to curl in the fabric of your shirt. 

Another moment, and he twitches again, and it’s not a twitch this time but a dry little sob. 

. . . 

You ask him more about how Hollows live. You learn that there’s no sun in their world, just a dark, empty sky, that the closest he’s ever come to seeing sunlight was through the curtains in his new room. 

The next day, you bring home a wheelchair and clothes that will fit him decently. Yylfordt protests, softer now than usual, but you insist. 

You take him outside, a blanket around his lap to hide the stumps. His face when he sees a clear, blue sky is somewhere between heartbreaking and exhilarating. Just because you can, you take him into town. Nowhere crowded or loud, just a space outside where Yylfordt can feel something other than the emptiness he described his world as being. 

A few people look at you strangely, but just as quickly decide that a young person and what appears to be a disabled friend or relative is nothing to stare at. Yylfordt flinches a bit whenever someone looks to close, making a face like he expects to have to defend himself. You lay a hand on his shoulder every time, pointing out something new and interesting, and the last bits of fear drain from his features. 

While you’re out, you stop and get him food from a local cafe; sweet pastry and a warm drink. Everything you can do to make him smile seems worth it at this point, horribly so, now that you know how he’s suffered. 

You get a genuine smile out of Yylfordt on your way home. 

It doesn’t seem to bother him that he’s dependent on you to move him. He’s interested in every little facet of your world, barraging you with questions over the things that you would have considered normal. He seems happier than ever, now that he’s out in the sunshine and fresh air, and you imagine that change from eternal darkness to  _ this _ is staggering. 

You’re talking with him, explaining something meaningless for no other reason than to let him have your attention. Everything is happy, peaceful, a rare moment of feeling like it will all be alright. 

You say as much, then, as an afterthought, that you’re going to  _ make sure  _ it is. You’ll protect him, you say, and feel every word down to your soul.

Yylfordt’s eye goes very, very wide. He looks up at you from his chair, like he can’t believe that you just said what you did. A second later, he’s looking away, a small, fragile smile half-hidden by angle alone. It’s the most genuine bit of happiness you’ve seen from him yet, for once not tainted by some kind of pain. He looks  _ happy,  _ truly so. 

“I’m happier here, I think…” he mumbles, later, when you’re helping him get settled into the blanket nest that his bed has become. “‘s nice… Everything’s warm…” 

“Good.” You kiss his forehead, for no reason but to feel the little shudder of happiness that goes through him at the affection. 

You’re not sure when this quit being simply trying to keep him alive, when it changed to wanting to see this fragile wreck of a creature happy and well and with you where you both are starting to realize he belongs. Even down three limbs and more traumatized than you think a human could be, you have the feeling that falling into your care was one of the best things that could happen to Yylfordt. Or at least, you’ll try to make so. 

Yylfordt squirms, wriggling himself down into what he’s admitted is the familiar scent of your home. A little purr is already rising in his throat. He’s warm and content, and nothing hurts. 

You think that alone is an improvement over his previous life. 

When you leave the room, it’s to the feeling that all is well, and that your little world will stay that way. 


	2. i'll be gone without a trace

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...once again, I start a chapter by saying that this took too long. >.> Like, I'm sorry. _Really_ sorry. But! This fic is done at last!! This is the second and final chapter, and it came out not only long but very, very good! I'm happy with it overall, even if it was a real pain in the ass to write... Anyway, I hope everyone enjoys the chapter!!! :D

The peace lasts for all of a week. 

It’s a good week, you’ll admit, full of showing Yylfordt more of the nicer things in your world, full of little steps of progress in dragging him back to something resembling human. 

And it’s okay. It’s okay that he’s slow at adjusting to not needing to fight and kill and struggle to stay alive. You don’t mind slow days just talking him out of nightmares or helping him learn that touch doesn’t have to hurt. Hollows, you’re discovering, are like overly affectionate cats. Or at least Yylfordt is. He’s needy, in a weird sort of way, and he really doesn't do much more than laze around and rest, sleeping more often than not. 

He’s happy, and that’s all you really want to ask for at this point. In fact, you’re just starting to think that things might stay that way, when, one quiet evening, there’s a slam of a knock at your door. 

You’re in what now amounts to Yylfordt’s room, relaxing quietly while he sleeps, one cool hand clinging softly to yours. The knock at the door is like thunder, loud enough to jolt Yylfordt awake with a full-body twitch. There’s one more ominous thud, and then everything goes quiet. 

For a second, Yylfordt blinks, an unreadable expression settling over his face. Then, his one eye goes very wide, shoulders going tight. 

“Hey… Don’t go check that. Stay here,” he says, voice strained, and yeah, that’s a bad sign if you ever saw one. You don’t know what Yylfordt is sensing, if that’s even the right word, but you’re going to do something about it. You don’t like seeing him scared, for one. 

You’ve got a weird feeling about whatever’s going on. 

“What is it? Do I need to be worried?” You glance out to the hallway, half ready to go out there yourself and deal with the matter. 

“‘t’s a Hollow…” Yylfordt mumbles, sounding like he doesn't want to admit it. There’s a note of something bitter and tense in his voice, though, and you have a feeling that he’s not telling you the whole truth. “We eat humans, so you’d better just leave it alone.” 

“What’s stopping it from coming in here then?” 

Yylfordt makes a noise that’s close to a growl. 

“It’s hurt, okay?” he snaps, glaring at the wall instead of looking at you. “Hurt enough that if you just leave things be, it’ll all take care of itself. The reiatsu is weak, so just leave it be and don’t mess with it.”

Oh. Well that’s not what you were expecting. On one hand, ‘human eating monster’ sounds like something you should avoid. At the same time, though, you kind of already have one of those in your house, and helping Yylfordt when he was in a similar state was  _ well  _ worth it in the first place. 

...You’re not going to let something die on your doorstep either. 

When you stand up, Yylfordt makes a miserable little noise, grabbing at your hand a second too late. He  _ whines  _ when you reassure him that you’ll be right back, bony hand clenching in the blankets on his bed. 

When you get to the back door, even you can feel that something is off. There’s a heavy feeling in the air, not unlike when you found Yylfordt for the first time, something thick, choking, and entirely unnatural. Whatever this is, you tell yourself, you’ll be able to handle it. Yylfordt said that the Hollow was injured, so at least you have some warning this time. 

You open the door to a sickeningly familiar sight. 

Your first thought is that that’s a whole lot of blood _.  _ Your second thought is something along the lines of  _ not again. _

. . . 

It looks a whole lot like a person, if you didn’t know better. He– again, a man– is slumped against the steps leading up to your back door, a disturbingly large pool of blood spreading out from under him. You can see right away that he’s missing both arms, that his hair is all but matted down with red, and you’re pretty sure that that’s at least one bit of bone poking out of his chest. The smell is even worse than last time, all thick, metallic copper filling your lungs, making your stomach lurch. 

For just a second, your heart feels like it’s going to pound through your chest. Then, the man starts to twitch, a sick little moan leaving his throat like someone wrapped their hands around his lungs and squeezed. 

You sink to your knees beside the man, slipping into crisis mode in a way that you  _ hate  _ is getting to be a habit. The man appears to be unconscious, just barely aware of the world around him. He doesn’t react until you touch him, one hand brushing along the mangled skin of his face. 

You’re expecting him to snap awake, to scream, to lash out and try to hurt you or otherwise show the same kind of panicked violence as Yylfordt. 

Instead, with what little strength he has left in him, the man curls in on himself like he’s trying to hide, trembling in a puddle of his own blood. 

It takes all of three seconds for your heart to break. 

. . .

Carrying the man inside is worryingly easy. He’s even lighter than Yylfordt, all sinew and bone, barely padded with lean muscle. You place him on the bathroom floor, right where you had Yylfordt just a few short weeks ago. Already, a fresh pool of blood is seeping into the floor. 

You get yourself down on the floor next to him, a fresh pile of towels next to you. With a quick shout to Yylfordt that you’re alright, you steel yourself for another long, bloody night. 

Like last time, you’re going to guess that stopping the bleeding is the best thing you can do. This man is a Hollow too, and as grotesque as the mess of blood and tissue and bits of gore looks right now, you can at least hope that he’ll be able to survive this. If you can do anything about it, he’s damn well going to. 

This man is slimmer than Yylfordt, all long legs and sharp angles. He doesn’t look quite as strong, doesn’t have the same wide set to his shoulders. His features, what you can see of them, look sort of familiar, in a way that you can’t quite place. Underneath the blood matting his hair, you can make out a bit of pink. There’s a pair of what looks like glasses still perched on his nose, and you know enough by now to know that that’s his mask. The hole in his lower abdomen is equally familiar. 

Hollow, you remind yourself, looking down at all the blood with a sick sense of dread. He can make it. You’re going to make sure of it. 

Again, you start by cutting off what tattered remains of clothes are still clinging on through the mess. It’s the same strange, white material as was on Yylfordt, and if you weren’t so panicked right now, you think you’d have some questions about that.

The main thing you need to deal with is the arms. Both of the man’s arms have been hacked off nearly at the shoulder, leaving just small, uneven stumps. You can see bone poking out of the wounds, shining white in the bright light of the bathroom. You tear a towel into shreds, and think you might be sick if this keeps up. 

Bandaging the stumps is exactly as gross as you were expecting, but when they’re both tied off in a way that  _ should  _ keep the man alive, you move on to see if there’s anything else as urgent. 

At least a few ribs are broken, you’re sure. His shins are snapped, both of them, bent at odd angles that make you gag a bit just looking at them. One cheek and one side of his neck have been scraped raw, like someone tried to flay the skin off and didn’t do a very good job of it. 

You’re just starting to try to make sense of what to do next, easing the man up into something like a sitting position, when his eyes slide open. 

Instantly, his gaze fixes onto you. You freeze. You remember very well what this was like with Yylfordt in the first days, and you’re ready for the exact same kind of explosion to happen all over again. 

Instead, the man starts to  _ shake.  _

His eyes go very, very wide, little trembles making his shoulders shake and his teeth click together. He stares at you through the mess of blood coating his face, and for one long moment, neither of you dare to move. 

A very, very soft sound– a choked off whimper– leaves his throat. His amber eyes are blown almost black, glazed over with pain and fear. You’re not sure whether to be grateful or worried that the man clearly isn’t with reality. He’s shaking harder now, chest heaving with jagged, terrified breaths. 

The Hollow’s legs curl up as much as he can make them, even as pain makes his movements jerky and stiff. You can  _ see  _ the snapped off bone inside them sliding against the skin. 

He half-slips in his own blood, feet scrabbling against the tile, and his eyes go impossibly wider when he realizes that he can’t hide. 

You feel like you should know how to deal with this kind of thing by now, but even with the man hyperventilating mere feet away, you’re caught between keeping your distance and reaching out. Either one could so easily end in outburst, and you still, _still_ don’t know how to handle this. 

His breath is all but tearing through his chest by now, making his crooked ribs shudder with frantic heaves. The freshly-bandaged stumps of his shoulders are twitching, like he’s trying to move what isn’t there anymore. The noises leaving him have risen to helpless, panicked little moans, low and pained like they’re being torn from his chest. 

You make one aborted little move towards him, desperate to do something to help, and whatever’s holding him up  _ breaks.  _

The Hollow abruptly goes limp, whole body sagging against the tile like someone cut the strings holding him up. Every part of him shudders once, hard, and then he’s all but a puddle on the tile. His breath goes from quick and panicked to slow and still, like he’s trying not to move. His eyes, still open, lose focus entirely, going glazed and blank. And then, his head tips back, baring his throat in one slow, agonizing motion. 

For a second, you honestly think you’ve broken him. Suddenly acting half–dead is what you would call a  _ very bad sign.  _

. . . 

You haul yourself back to Yylfordt’s room bloody and exhausted, not bothering to change your clothes. He’s seen plenty of blood before, and it’s not likely that some rather fresh stains will cause a meltdown. 

Yylfordt is a lump in the blankets, a puff of blond the only thing visible of him. He’s wormed his way into the blankets again, and the only way you can tell he’s not asleep is how the lump shifts when you sit down on the edge of the bed, burying your face in your hands with a pained sigh. 

“What’d you do?” he asks, half–muffled. 

“Same thing I did with you; dragged him inside and bandaged up the worst of it. It was gross and bloody and I think I’ve seen the inside of enough body parts to last me two lifetimes. I’m hoping he lives, but at this point, who knows?” The last part is punctuated with a bit of a laugh. The stress is getting to you, you know it. You’re so, so tired of scared things huddling terrified and bloody like they think you’re going to hurt them more.

Yylfordt doesn’t say anything, just slides himself up far enough to pop his head out from under the blankets and look at you. 

“I’m tired, Yyl.” 

“Don’t say that.” There’s a note of panic in his voice. 

“I’ll get over it. I just... he acts like you did. Like he thinks I’m going to kill him at any second. He woke up while I was taking care of everything and just kinda collapsed. Like, he went all limp and out of it, and I still don’t know what I did, but are Hollows _supposed_ to have an off switch?” You sound half–hysterical, and you know it. 

Yylfordt makes a choked little noise. When you look up, he’s gone rather flushed, hand clutching at the blankets. 

“What, did I do something I shouldn’t have?” The look of muted horror on his face lightens the mood a bit, somehow, and you can’t help but press. 

“He thought he was gonna  _ die  _ is all,” Yylfordt mutters, still looking sort of offended. “It’s a fuckin’ stupid instinct. He’s hurt and weak and can’t fight back or nothing, so of course he thought you were planning on killing him. It’s kinda… kinda like playing dead. Goin’ all limp so whatever’s bigger and stronger might decide you’re not worth the effort.”

“Like a possum?” Okay, Yylfordt probably doesn’t even know what a possum is, but that mental image is so hilarious that it crosses right over into heartbreaking. “Wait, uh, why do you look so freaked out by it?”

Yylfordt has been slowly going redder through his explanation, voice going muffled like he doesn’t want to so much as say it. 

“Shut up!” he yelps, abruptly rolling over and burying himself in the blankets again. “We’re not talking about this anymore!” Yep, he’s embarrassed. Cute. 

Because you feel a little sorry for him now, you scoot yourself up to Yylfordt’s side, running a hand down his good shoulder and rolling him over just enough to press a kiss to the side of his head. Yylfordt leans up into the touch without a moment of hesitation. 

“We’re gonna be okay, Yyl. I’ll take care of it, okay? I’m tired, yeah, but I can do it. You’re both going to be safe with me.”

Protective, just like he needs it. The sentiment is one of the most effective things for calming Yylfordt down, and exactly as you expected, he slowly relaxes under your touch, burrowing even further into the blankets. It’s okay, you try to tell yourself. You’re not lying. You took care of one injured disaster of a Hollow, and you can do it again. You know better this time what to do and what to avoid, and if that other Hollow turns out to be anything like Yylfordt, you’ll take care of him too. 

Half for your own comfort, you ease yourself down and pull Yylfordt into a hug, squeezing as tightly as you dare. He’s solid and strong and  _ real  _ under your touch, and you almost believe that you’ll be okay. 

. . .

A few minutes later, and you’re back in your kitchen, still trying to calm down. You’re shaken up, badly, hands trembling and visions of sawed off limbs filling your mind every time you close your eyes. 

You’re flopped down at your table, laying your head in your hands and trying not to think about what the inside of someone’s skin looks like. You got yourself a glass of juice at some point, but all you can taste is blood, thick and metallic and clinging to the inside of your mouth. 

You lay there for a bit, just trying to breathe and calm down and think of what you should do next. 

There’s another half-dead Hollow in your house. You don’t want to throw him out or anything, but can you really take care of two of them? This one is every bit as crippled as Yylfordt, and from what he’s told you about Hollow life, the new one would be killed the second another of his kind found him. Eaten, you correct yourself. Something would  _ eat  _ him. 

Yeah, there’s no way you can throw him out. 

You’re still thinking about what you’re going to do with yet another damaged, broken creature that thinks you’re going to kill him when you get the sudden feeling that you need to step outside. 

A shiver runs through you. You stand up, and four steps later, slide the back door open. 

Cool night air fills your lungs, chills your skin. You stare down at the massive bloodstain slowly drying on your back porch, worryingly person-shaped. You think you’re going to have to paint over that. 

And then, your eyes flicker upwards for just a moment. 

There’s a piece of paper tacked to the wall beside your door. 

Your stomach drops hard, a sick feeling settling deep into your gut, but you grab the paper anyway, pulling it away from where it was stuck to the wall. At first glance, it looks like a simple piece of white paper. Printer paper, maybe. Then you notice that there’s writing on the backside. 

Knowing already that this isn’t going to be good, you flip it over and start to read. From the first sentence, you feel like throwing up. 

‘ _ You’re having a good time with your guest, aren’t you? Is he behaving well for you? Since you seem to be having so much fun with him, I thought I’d get you a little present. You liked what I did to the first one, after all. I made sure to make it so that this one wouldn’t give you any trouble either. You might as well have the completed set, don’t you think?’ _

Something was watching you. Someth– no,  _ someone  _ knew about Yylfordt and how you were taking care of him. That someone cared enough to dump a whole new mutilated Hollow on your doorstep. 

You step back inside and slam the door. 

. . . 

You sit with the new Hollow for a while, taking out your laptop again and keeping an eye on him while he sleeps. He passed out again after the last episode and has been a curled up ball of misery ever since. 

What you’re going to do with two of them, you really don’t know. One terrified, mutilated Hollow was hard enough to fix up, and how you’re going to manage to do it all again is beyond you. That said, it’s not like you can abandon him, not when you know already that he’d be dead without you. You have another Hollow now. That’s just the way it is. You try to tell yourself that you’re going to be able to handle it, just like last time. 

You watch cat videos until you feel a little better, drowning out the bathroom full of blood for a little bit. It doesn’t fix things, but it’s better than staring at a near-corpse and waiting for something to happen. 

After a while, you see the Hollow start to twitch. Remembering last time, you keep the laptop pointedly open. You’re not going to make any sudden movements. Sudden movements end in very scared Hollows. It’s best, you think, to just sit still and wait for him to calm down on his own. 

When you look up over the edge of your laptop a few minutes later, the Hollow is staring at you with huge, golden eyes. 

He’s shaking again, badly, and the bandaged stumps of his arms are twitching like he wants to curl in on himself and hide. You feel kind of sorry for him that he can’t. Yylfordt always does better when he feels like he can hide somehow. Laying exposed and spread out on cold tile floor has to be almost torture for the same kind of creature. 

Blankets. As soon as he’s a little less bloody, you’re going to get him lots of blankets. You can’t imagine that he’d reject being able to curl up under a pile of them and block out the world for a while. 

After you’ve given the Hollow enough time to (hopefully) get used to your presence, you slowly slide your computer out of your lap. The Hollow’s eyes haven’t left you for an instant, and even the careful movements make him flinch, hard, shaking even more violently when you start to shift. 

Just push through, you try to tell yourself. You have to get him cleaned up at some point. He might realize that you’re not going to hurt him if you get close enough, and anyway, those bandages need to be changed. 

You crawl over to the Hollow, half expecting him to lash out at you like Yylfordt did. Scared animals get desperate. You wouldn’t be surprised if he  _ did  _ try to hurt you with whatever strength he has left. 

But the Hollow doesn’t do much of anything. He just lays there shaking, massive eyes fixed on you like you’ll kill him the moment he looks away. You get right up beside him, sitting on the tile about a foot away, and all he does is tremble, breath a sharp, staccato rhythm in his chest. 

Okay, you think, this won’t be so bad. You can probably get the bandages changed with him like this, all subdued and shaky and weak. 

You reach out to start on the bandages around his left shoulder, and that all changes. 

The Hollow makes an awful, keening noise, and tries to scramble away from you. All he really succeeds in doing is squirming on the tile, broken legs scrabbling desperately against the floor. His mangled face lands in his own blood, soaking his already blood-matted hair with red. You can see every bone in his spine when his back is turned to you, every defined muscle in his skinny body standing out with tension. 

For a second, you freeze. A second later, you grit your teeth and crawl over after him. You can’t be scared. He’s going to hurt himself if you let him keep writhing, going to tear open his wounds even worse than before. 

You grab the Hollow by his shoulders, rolling him over onto his back with as much gentleness as you can muster. The Hollow’s breath tears through his chest, ribs straining crooked and sharp against his pale, bruised skin. A sick little moan leaves his throat, all terror and panic, and those massive eyes fix on your face like he thinks he’s going to die then and there.

“Shush. I’m not going to hurt you. It’ll be okay.” You comb your fingers through the blood-soaked mass of his hair, brushing back his bangs. 

You can do this. All you can do is push through and get him cleaned up. Still leaning as much weight as you dare into keeping the Hollow pinned down, you try to ignore the way he’s shaking like a leaf in the wind. 

The Hollow’s throat bobs, jaw twitching. A dry tongue flickers out over his lips in a motion that’s distressingly human. Distressingly afraid. 

“D-Do–” His pupils are so wide that all you can see of his eyes is black.

“D-D– Don’t ki–, kill m-me–.”

Yep, that’s heartbreaking. The Hollow’s eyes go wet, a few tears spilling over and streaking messy lines through the blood coating his face. Your fingers twitch where they hold his shoulders, and a pathetic little sob hitches through the Hollow’s chest, sharp and frantic. 

A second later, his eyes roll and flutter closed. He’s passed out. He’s passed out from terror while you’re pinning him down. 

You feel distinctly sick. 

. . . 

“He passed out. I barely touched him, and he passed out. I mean, it’s kind of better than screaming and threatening to kill me, but also kind of twice as sad. Am I messing this up? Should I just leave him alone and hope for the best?” you ask Yylfordt, well aware that you sound more than a little frantic by now. At this point, you’re just hoping you’re not fucking things up.

Yylfordt makes an annoyed sound, rolling over to face you. His hand curls in the blankets, and he looks over at you with his good eye like he thinks you’re very, very stupid. He might be right. 

“What’re you doing trying to be so _nice_? Hollows don’t need it. You’re wasting your time trying to coddle him. He’s just gonna be fuckin’ scared of you.” The look on Yylfordt’s face is nearly a pout. You have the distinct feeling that he’s just trying to act tough by saying that. 

“You liked the ‘coddling’ just fine.”

Yylfordt flinches.

“Sorry,” you laugh, “I’ll quit teasing you.” Your words are punctuated by Yylfordt throwing a pillow at your head. “Seriously though, what can I be doing that will end in… less of that? Less panic. Less passing out.”

“Fuck if I know. There isn’t really a shortcut to making a Hollow think you’re  _ not  _ gonna just kill it when its guard is down. Not like any of us have been through anything else.” He sighs, hard, like you’re asking a question that there’s no answer to. 

“But what about you? I mean, you trust me now. What made things change from you thinking I was going to kill you?”

Yylfordt makes a little choking sound, burying his face in the blanket in front of him. It’s always cute when he gets embarrassed, like he thinks there’s some kind of shame in how much he likes being taken care of. Still, it’s probably better to pull him out of that pout before he gets all moody. Might as well cut things off before the atmosphere goes sour. 

You poke his shoulder, smiling. “Come on, don’t be like that. I  _ like  _ spoiling you, and you know it. After all the shit you’ve been through, I think you deserve it. You know I’d never want it any other way.”

Yep, that draws an embarrassed little noise out of him, Yylfordt finally looking up at you from under messy, blonde bangs. Just because you can, you lean in a press a kiss to the side of his head, delighting in the way he melts, head tipping back on its own.

“So what did help with you? Is there anything I could do to help our new house guest get the message that I’m not going to hurt him?”

After a moment, Yylfordt mumbles, “...the blankets were nice. Um.” He pauses, swallows hard. “It was nice to be able to… hide, I guess. Like not just be stuck on the floor all helpless. Heater was good too. It’s fucking freezing where we’re from. Any of that help?”

“Wonderful, thank you,” you beam. “You wanna get some sleep now? I’m going to go keep watch on him for a while again, make sure he doesn’t panic and hurt himself while I’m gone.”

You leave Yylfordt to rest– Hollows are like giant cats, they can sleep for twenty hours a day, you swear–, and go to dig out the hugest, fluffiest blankets you can find. Even if they do get bloodstained, at this point, anything is better than panic and begging you not to kill him. You get the heater too, because of course you do, and haul everything back to the little bathroom where the Hollow is still entirely passed out. 

The Hollow has curled himself up into a little knot of skinny legs and stand-out ribs. He’s shaking a bit, shivering in his sleep, mouth parted just enough that you can see the blood on his teeth. You come to a decision before you know it. 

Crouching down, you sit right beside the Hollow, directly in his space. You run your hand over the upper edge of his mangled shoulder, where throat joins to arm, petting over cool, bloody skin. The Hollow shakes a little harder, eyelids twitching behind the bone frames of his mask. The thin lines of white are so delicate.  _ He’s  _ so delicate, far too thin and drawn tight, like the wrong poke could make him fall apart. A surge of something protective rises in your chest like water. You keep rubbing the Hollow’s shoulder. 

Eventually, his eyes twitch, then snap open. The Hollow looks at you for just a moment, utter disbelief filling his glassy eyes. A second later, his mouth slides open with a soft  _ pop,  _ and a sick little moan leaves his throat. He starts to squirm away, frantically, breath tearing through his chest like it’s trying to escape. You tug him back towards you, and grab a blanket. 

The Hollow’s face when you wrap the fluffiest blanket you have around his shoulders is almost comical. If he wasn’t so scared, you think you might have laughed. His eyes go painfully wide, an actual whimper slipping out of his mouth. You tuck the blanket in around his shoulders. 

“Shush. I’m not going to hurt you. You need to be awake for this, okay? Gotta learn that I’m only here to help.”

Two blankets later, the Hollow is finally starting to still. He’s shaking violently, massive gold eyes fixed on you like you’re going to lunge for him at any second, but he’s not struggling too much. You can tell that he’s only barely conscious, just lucid enough to tell that you’re in the room, so it’s kind of a small victory. You’ll have to see how it goes when he’s more aware.

And then, instinct starts to take over. Just like Yylfordt, the Hollow begins to curl up, legs tucking in close to his body and shoulders angling in. As well as he can without arms, he burrows down into the softness, body moving on autopilot in an attempt to hide. 

“Wha–, wh…” The Hollow’s voice is low and cracked, weak enough that you can imagine that even the few words are an effort. “Wh-Why…?” He shudders, teeth clacking together and choking out the words. 

You wrap the last blanket around him loosely, making as much of a nest as you can. 

“I’m here to help. You’re safe.” You don’t know if he can understand you. You could be wasting the breath, for all you know, but at least you know that this could be progress. If he remembers this later, maybe it’ll finally sink in that you won’t kill him while his guard is down. 

Switching on the heater, you settle down about a foot away from the blanket wrap of a Hollow, getting out your computer and preparing for another long night. You’ll sleep in here if you have to, if you think it’ll do any good. You cleaned up most of the blood on the floor while he was passed out earlier, so at least your shorts aren’t getting soaked all over again. 

The Hollow heaves a broken sigh that sounds rather like a death rattle. He’s snuggled into the blankets in a way that you hope is comfortable, and with the room slowly warming up from the heater, you can only hope that he’s feeling even a little bit closer to safe. 

It’s okay. You can do this. You’ve fixed one broken mess of a Hollow, and you can do it again. Somehow, he’ll be alright. 

. . . 

Coddling is the way to go, it seems. It makes sense, in a sad sort of way. You don’t really want to think about what kind of things Hollows have been through that such simple comforts make such a difference, but you can work with it. It gives you even a flimsy edge. 

You split your time between keeping a careful eye on the mess of a Hollow buried in the blanket pile on your bathroom floor… and the one tangled up in the nest within his own room. Yylfordt seems on edge, in a weird sort of way. He keeps eyeing the hallway, startling at sounds, trailing off in conversation in nervous gestures that seem downright unsettled. 

You’re well aware that it’s thanks to the other Hollow. There’s not much you can do, though, so you pretend not to notice how anxious Yylfordt is starting to act. It’s better not to make him feel worse. 

As usual, a lot of your time together is spent spoiling Yylfordt. Especially with the extra stress, the poor man damn well needs it. You never quite get over how he leans into every touch like he’s starved for it. 

Running a brush through Yylfordt’s hair makes him shudder, eyelids fluttering. You sit behind him, combing through his hair with a soft brush and softer fingers. His hair, even chopped off as it was, falls to his mid back, thicker and coarser than anything human, but still almost fluffily soft. You should trim up the uneven edges soon, you think. He’d look a little less ragged with his hair taken care of. 

A purr rattles Yylfordt’s chest as you work, taking every spare moment to scratch at his scalp, to brush the edge of his mask with gentle hands. At this point, you’re not even doing any real work, just petting him for the sake of giving him the contact and attention. 

It’s an easy distraction from the mess in your bathroom. Yylfordt’s hair is soft, his purr is calming even to you, and when you’re like this, it’s easy to pretend like the two of you really are out of the woods for now. 

But that’s not the truth, and both of you know it. You keep getting the feeling that Yylfordt is hiding something. From the looks of it, something that he  _ really  _ doesn’t want you to know. His behavior is downright suspicious when it’s coming from someone who’s been a relaxed mess of contentment right up until the second Hollow showed up. And yeah, maybe it makes sense that he’s just on edge because of the newcomer. Somehow, you have the feeling that there’s something more than that going on here.

“Alright,” you finally press, once you’ve moved on to outright petting him, after the brush is abandoned, “what aren’t you telling me?”

Yylfordt freezes, hunching in on himself as much as he can. Yep. You called it. That’s a guilty reaction if you ever saw one, and you pretty well know your boy by now anyway. Now the only question is what you’re going to get out of him when he finally does spill the little secret. 

“N-Nothing...” Yylfordt starts, sounding quite a bit like a guilty child. You poke his head lightly, and he very dramatically tips over, flopping back down on the bed as if to tell you that he’s not talking about this anymore.

“Mhmm. Yep. I believe that.” You pause to let the sarcasm sink in. “Not. Now come on. We’ve got enough stress going on here; we don’t need you withholding information on top of it. Is what you’re not telling me so bad? Do you think I’m going to be mad at you? Just tell me. Please? I’d rather know now than later... and you  _ know  _ it’ll come out eventually.”

Yylfordt makes an annoyed noise, but looks up at you with his one good eye, rolling over to face you. Curling in enough that you can tell he’s nervous, he gives you one of those looks that mean he’s thinking a little too hard about what kind of not-person he was before all of this. 

“Fine. Okay. You’re gonna regret it, but I’ll tell you. That Hollow you picked up? I know him. We’re from the same place, and I hate his guts, and he hates mine, and when he wakes up for real it’s gonna be  _ bad. _ ” It all spills out at once, Yylfordt glaring at you with less venom than he probably wants to. You can’t exactly say you’re shocked. You were expecting  _ something,  _ and that little bit of information was as strange as anything could have been.

“That’s it? You know him?” You stare Yylfordt straight in the eye, and yep, he’s still making a very suspicious face indeed. He’s trying way too hard to look pissed about admitting that. “See, I get the feeling you’re still not telling me something. Why do you two hate each other so much? Are you friends–turned–enemies or something? Oh, fuck, are you family? Can Hollows  _ have  _ family? Is that a thing?” Once again, you’re rambling a bit, but fuck it, you’re stressed. You’re just about to pause in your rant and start laughing at how stupid it is when you see the face Yylfordt is making.

He looks horrified. He’s staring at you with a look of utter shock, and it sinks it much too fast that your little rant might have had more truth to it than you ever would have guessed.  _ That  _ is a guilty face indeed.

“You’re family, aren’t you?” 

Yylfordt swallows, nods, and you don’t know if you want to laugh or slam your head against a wall. That’s... that’s not what you were expecting. 

“Yeah, he’s my brother... He’s a piece of shit too, trust me. A real sicko. You’re not gonna like it when he’s conscious and acting like himself. I swear, he’s a total bitch.” Yylfordt makes a truly disgusted face as he talks. You can really believe that the two of them are brothers, but you can’t believe that Yylfordt held it all in for this long. 

It’s almost funny. Or at least, it’s funny right up until you remember the note that was tacked to your door. ‘The completed set’. That line suddenly both makes sense and makes you absolutely sick. 

Whatever dropped the new one off  _ knew  _ that he was Yylfordt’s brother. Whatever knew that has been watching you. That’s a terrifying prospect on every level, but you know you have to choke it down. Helpless as he is, Yylfordt wouldn’t take well to news like that. At the very least, you shouldn’t let him know that his brother- as much as he seems and claims to hate him- was brought here for such a messed up reason. 

“Okay, okay, a total bitch, I hear you. So what’s the bitch’s name?” You pat Yylfordt’s head when you ask, ruffling the blond fluff of his hair.

“...Szayel,” Yylfordt spits out, all but pouting even as you play with his hair. “I swear, you’re gonna regret keeping him. You’ll regret helping.”

. . . 

Okay, you think to yourself as you stand in the hallway outside your bathroom, you definitely hear movement in there. The Hollow- no, Szayel is awake, and from the sound of it, quite possibly panicking again. Is again even the right word? The past couple times have been more like quiet, desperate fear than the sort of panic you saw with Yylfordt. 

The heater is still on, or at least it should be. You left Szayel tangled up in blankets, the heater on a low setting a few feet away. He needs the warmth, you know he does, and from the reaction you got earlier, you’re guessing he agrees. However, agreement does not a calm Hollow make, and now, you’re sort of worried that this is about to go bad all over again. You think back with no fondness upon the early days of being with Yylfordt.

You brought a cup of warm broth with you in the hopes of making nice. You remember Yylfordt’s reactions to you feeding him with almost disturbing clarity, and well... feeding this new one doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all. He’s so skinny, he probably needs the calories and then some.  

When you open the door, crouching low almost immediately, Szayel is awake, as lucid as you’ve seen him yet. He’s glaring at you with brilliant amber eyes, blankets kicked off and bandages soaked through with red. 

However, his eyes are still clouded over, and you can see the way that sitting up is making him unstable. He’s not anywhere near well enough to be holding himself upright through force of will alone, as much as you’re sure he’d like to be. This is going to be a fun one; you can feel it already. 

“Um, hi?” you start, hoping that you don’t piss him off or scare him. You don’t know which would be better at this point. 

“D-Don’t... don’t speak to m-me like that... human,” Szayel gets out, voice still rough and tense. It sounds like he has blood in his throat. He probably  _ does  _ have blood in his throat, and that’s a lot more worrying to you than the sassy tone he’s taking. Anyone would be grouchy in this situation.

“Okay, then how do you want me to talk to you?” You scoot towards Szayel, not missing the instinctive flinch when you get within two feet. “I don’t want to offend you. I’m just trying to help, promise.” 

You flash a smile. Szayel doesn’t seem convinced. 

“I d-don’t... w-want some inferior  _ human  _ tampering with m-me...” Szayel mutters. He can’t work up much volume. His everything is still probably too fucked up for that, and you still can’t even guess at internal damage. It’s a really good thing that these guys can heal, even if the process is all kinds of miserable during the drawn-out parts. 

But yeah, that’s disheartening. While you’d normally think he’s just acting tough, something about the bitter tone in Szayel’s voice worries you. 

“Uh, sorry? I think you’re going to have to make do with some tampering, though. You’re kind of in bad shape, and I’m going to have to be the one to... ‘tamper’, ‘cause no one else is really here.” It’s the truth, plain and simple. You know that lying is a bad idea on every front, but you’re still hoping that the bluntness doesn’t get a bad reaction. Szayel is still doing his best to make a truly irritated face, one that’s starting to read as disdainful. You start to think that this might be more difficult than Yylfordt was. 

However, you can see the way he’s shaking even as he insistently sits up to face you. You can see how glassy his eyes still are. By your guess, he’s sitting up solely so he doesn’t have to feel quite so vulnerable, even if it means he’ll crash the second you leave the room. He’s still, so, so weak, and if the way Yylfordt reacted leaves you with any room to guess, you’d assume that he doesn’t quite realize just how broken his body is right now.

Szayel actually  _ growls _ , though, and you’re left wondering if getting close is even a good idea at this point. You don’t want to irritate him, but you also know that you have a  _ thing  _ that you brought in that’s going to make a huge difference in how Szayel feels about this whole mess. 

“Sh-Sh, shut up...” Szayel gets out again. “ _ Leave.” _

“Nope, not doing that.” Once again, you’re determined to power through. “I have something for you.” You scoot a little bit closer, ignoring both how much taller Szayel is than you and how he twitches nervously when you get within touching distance. Instead, you slide the mug of broth over from behind you, noting happily that it’s still deliciously warm. 

“Drink this. I’ll leave once you do.”

Szayel makes a truly impressive face for how bloody he is, broken legs squirming uneasily in front of him. It’s the first sign of direct fear you’ve gotten yet this time, which definitely isn’t good. He doesn’t trust you at all. 

“Wh-What... is that...? ‘t’s... It’s poi-poisoned, isn’t i-it...?” Szayel’s speech is slipping. He’s tired. He’s eyeing the mug of broth like it could kill him. That’s sad on a thousand levels. You really need to get something warm inside this poor man before your heart actually starts to break. 

“Nope. No poison. Just broth. You know, human food?” You put on your absolute best harmless face and hold the mug up towards him. 

To his credit, Szayel doesn’t flinch. He also doesn’t seem to quite realize that he doesn’t have arms at the moment, and leans back against the bathtub with a sigh, glaring at you when his bare stomach is exposed. 

“Fine.” You know already that that’s all the permission you’re getting. He’s probably too tired to resist at this point. Or thinks you’ll kill him. 

So you slide in close, carefully making sure not to brush against anything too tender, and hold the mug slowly up to Szayel’s lips. You’re used to this with Yylfordt, so carefully tipping it isn’t difficult at all. Szayel’s bruised, blood-crusted lips open just barely, taking a small sip of the broth.

You have to half–catch the mug when Szayel jerks  _ hard _ , eyes going wide. A pink tongue flickers out over his bottom lip, catching the last of the taste, you can imagine he’d be reaching for you if he had arms that worked. He eyes the mug like he’d rather like to snatch it from you and down the whole thing in one go. You’re pretty glad he can’t do that. 

Without a word, not wanting to insult him, you hold the mug up again, this time letting Szayel take a longer swallow. He starts shaking somewhere around the third gulp. You can only imagine what it feels like to one of these cold creatures to feel heat going down from the inside. You only know what Yylfordt’s told you, but their world is apparently a frigid one. Things like warm food and blankets are unheard of. Comforts meant for humans alone.

All too soon, the broth is gone, and you’re left sitting beside a bloody mess of a Hollow, him staring at you like he can’t believe what just happened. Szayel’s head tips forward every so slowly, a long, drawn–out shudder working its way through his shoulders and spine. 

“You can have more later,” you say, trying to sound reassuring. You hope it doesn’t come off as patronizing or mocking. “For now, is there anything I can do for you? Anything to make you more comfortable?” 

Szayel looks at you like you’ve grown a second head.

“...bl-blood...” he mutters eventually, sounding tensely hesitant. “I’m... fil–filthy. ‘t’s... disgusting...” 

Yeah, he’s tired.  _ Real  _ tired. You can for sure imagine not liking being covered in a mix of dried and fresh blood, though. Even though a real bath probably isn’t the best idea yet, you can get  _ some  _ of the mess of right now. ‘Cause yeah. It looks all kinds of yucky crusted onto his skin like that. 

“Okay. I can’t give you a real bath for a while yet because I don’t want to reopen your wounds, but I can get at least some of that blood off now. Hold still for me, ‘kay?” With another smile, you lean up to grab a washcloth.

You dampen the cloth with warm water, then once again get into Szayel’s space. You cup his bruised chin with one hand, angling his face up just slightly. His (gorgeous) golden eyes narrow just a bit, glassy and tired as they are. Poor thing. You slide the washcloth along his cheek first, scrubbing lightly before you move on to anything too delicate. 

Szayel hisses and winces a bit, but doesn’t try to move away. You imagine that the reaction is more from fear than pain. Hollows are  _ tough _ , you know it. A little bit of scrubbing shouldn’t do any more than sting. 

You get pretty much all of the blood off of his face, carefully avoiding the delicate frames of his mask, which still bears a couple of red stains. You imagine that having all the blood off of even such a small area would feel like a massive relief, and Szayel certainly looks that feeling. He’s gone progressively more limp as you worked, eyes closed and looking like he could fall asleep where he’s leaning. He probably should. You’re both aware of how exhausted he is, even if he doesn’t want to admit to it. 

“There. That should feel at least sort of better. I’ll get you a real bath as soon as some of those wounds close up, alright?” You smile. Szayel glares through lidded eyes. You see some very strong points in Yylfordt’s argument that his brother is, indeed, a bitch. In a sort of cute way though. He’s  _ pink _ .

On the same impulse that lead you to figuring out how Yylfordt’s own Hollow biology worked, you reach out, gently, carefully patting the bloody pink fluff of his hair. It’s soft. Even matted and tangled, it’s  _ soft.  _

But Szayel flinches hard, jerking away from you as his eyes go wide. He looks at you like you’re about to stab him, like you’re about to hurt him, and growls under his breath again when you try to get closer. You’re determined. He may be scared, but this is what gets you breakthroughs. 

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Sh-Shut up..! Don’t  _ t-touch  _ me. G-get your dis-disgusting... hands off of me...” Szayel sounds rather like he wants to kill you. Considering that he’s down two limbs and barely conscious, you’re not exactly afraid. 

You don’t answer. This is probably pushing the limits of what you should be doing, lack of permission wise, but you  _ know  _ this is going to do him some good. You comb your fingers through the matted pink mess of Szayel’s hair, scratching lightly at his scalp all the while. The poor man is tense all over, like he thinks you’re going to break him. You remember how Yylfordt was, and gentle your touches even a little more. 

Szayel hisses viciously, trying to twist away. You think he might be about to attempt biting you, but then you slide your fingers down over the sharp curve of his jaw, nails scritching just under his chin, and something starts to break. A little gasp leaves Szayel’s throat, high and stifled. It’s a quiet sound, barely audible, but one that you pick up on instantly.

That’s the kind of sound Yylfordt makes when you do something that feels particularly good- or at least it was, back when he still cared about looking proud and untouchable in front of you.

 So you slide your fingers over that spot again, dragging blunt nails over tender skin just lightly enough not to aggravate any bruises. Szayel’s protests spike, then go quiet, his head tipping gently into your hand even as he’s still glaring. You don’t think he’s angry- you think he’s mostly confused. 

And then, on the same sort of wild hunch, you slide your hand up and run one exceptionally careful finger over the upper rim of Szayel’s mask. 

That light touch earns you a hard, vicious flinch. Szayel makes a horrible choking noise, eyes going wide and body trying to curl in with limbs he doesn’t have. But you see the shudder, the same as Yylfordt’s. That felt good. You  _ know  _ it felt good for him. On faith that you can make this work, you repeat the motion, this time smoothing down and around the outer edge of the thin bone. Once again, Szayel shudders hard, closed eyes squinching shut even tighter. His empty shoulders hunch in, trying to hide. 

It’s somewhere between precious and heartbreaking. These people are  _ human.  _ They’re human, and they’ve been so starved of anything positive or kind that the barest amounts of petting are overwhelming. You know they eat humans. You know you don’t have the full story. It still tugs at your chest that you have to see this. That they have to live like this. 

So you keep running warm fingers over the glasses–shaped mask. The bone- you  _ think  _ it’s bone- is smooth and cool, a beautiful texture under your fingers, and every touch draws another stifled sound out of Szayel. 

He’s not telling you to stop. You hear a few muttered comments every time he can catch his breath, but the initial panic has faded. You might be pushing a boundary. You probably are. But you have to do  _ something  _ to show that you’re serious about not hurting him. Jumping right in and doing the same things that worked on Yylfordt is probably a good place to start. It feels right, in a way, coddling a creature that’s never had a chance. 

Your finger slips under the outer edge of the glasses, against where the mask meets skin on the side of Szayel’s head. The simple touch earns a full–body jerk and the loudest whimper yet. You think, for all the pride that this man has that’s holding him back, he’s more sensitive than Yylfordt. 

There’s only so far you can push this. After thumbing over that particular spot a few more times, soaking in the first noises out of Szayel that don’t sound even the slightest bit pained, you let yourself lean back on your heels, pulling away from Szayel altogether. His expression is dizzied, eyes glassier than ever, and you’re thoroughly convinced that even now, he has very little idea of what’s happening. He’s still only barely lucid. 

As soon as you’re not holding him up, Szayel all but flops down to the tile, curling in on himself in a motion fast enough that you can see him gag. He’s shaking, overstimulated just from that much contact all at once.

Behind the lensless frames of his mask, you can see redness around his eyes, the faintest bit of wetness beading at the corners. Szayel swallows hard, body huddling in, broken legs skidding uselessly on the slick tile as he tries to pull himself into the smallest, most protected ball possible. 

You think you might have hit some kind of off switch. 

. . . 

Szayel slips in and out of consciousness for the next few days. He’s healing, slowly, but the few times you catch him awake are barely lucid, dreaming more than his eyes are open. He mumbles unintelligible words in his sleep, squirming restlessly with legs that seem a little less broken than before, and somehow, he begins to heal. 

Hollow healing really is some kind of miracle. Szayel’s wounds stubbornly knit themselves together over the days. Open, bloody parts of skin slowly become something a little more whole. A little more right. 

It worries you that Szayel isn’t waking up for more than a few minutes at a time, but sleep, right? You know that sleep is good for healing humans, and that Yylfordt sleeps more often than not when he’s relaxed, so Szayel resting so much is probably normal and good. Probably. There’s no real way to know, since your one reliable source of information on Hollow biology is a little too preoccupied with hating his brother to enlighten you on very much. 

You try to wipe up some of the blood when you can. After the last incident, you’re not exactly eager to touch Szayel without permission, but cleaning up some of the blood around him is probably a good start. He already established that he hates being dirty, so this will probably be a nice thing to wake up to when he does. You try not to think the unspoken  _ if. _

And then, on the fourth day of waiting around for something to change, Szayel wakes up to something a little more aware. 

You’re sitting next to him when it happens, watching over his corpse-still body in the hopes that something good will come. Once again, your laptop is against your knees, and once again, you’re wearing your most expendable clothes. As you’ve been every day, you’re expecting the worst.

Szayel’s amber eyes crack open out of nowhere, blinking blearily at the world around him. He squirms, twitchings, the stumps of his shoulders curling in in a way that you know means they’re still looking for what used to be attached. His bare feet slide against the tile testingly, as if once again trying to analyze what’s around him. There’s some level of clarity in his eyes this time, some set to his face that’s the most aware you’ve seen him yet. Hopefully that’s a good thing. Hopefully it won’t end too badly for now.

“Hello,” you say eloquently, waving one hesitant hand. Szayel blinks again, stares at you for a moment, and then his eyes narrow sharply. 

“Ah, it’s you again,” he mutters, his speech far less garbled than before, even if his voice is still dangerously weak. You have to strain to hear him. “I see you’ve returned to torment me again. What are you going to do this time? What will you call helping now that I’m awake for it?”

Even as he says it, Szayel’s cheeks are dusted a pink that doesn’t quite seem to be fever. You probably humiliated him, you think with a wince. The touching from earlier  _ had  _ to be pleasant, but at the same time, you’ve already figured out that Szayel has way more pride than his brother. You could bet that you’ve bruised his ego just enough to make him bristle. 

“Well,” you start, “I was thinking that we could get the rest of that blood off of you today. You said you wanted that, right? You’ve healed up a little better, so it should be safe to deal with the mess this time.”

Szayel makes a face, then closes his eyes. You can tell he’s in agreement, but just doesn’t want to say it. You’d be disgusted covered in all that gore too, so it’s not like getting him cleaned up feels like an unreasonable idea. It would be a good place to start with bonding too, and you damn well know you need a lot of that. Szayel still looks at you like you’re going to kill him- or worse, crush his ego under your heel. 

“Very well. But I will be cleaning myself to the best of my ability.” Szayel’s tone can really only be considered prissy, and you’re reminded all over again of what Yylfordt said about his brother. A bitch.  _ Yep.  _

A sinking feeling settles into the pit of your stomach like a stone.

“Um,” you start, already knowing where this is going, “I don’t think there’s too much of that part that you can do.” Again. You’re going to have to deal with one of them realizing that they’re down a few limbs once again. Whether it’s pain tolerance or just plain disorientation, Szayel obviously doesn’t realize he’s missing pieces. You would guess that all he knows is that a lot of things hurt, and that he hasn’t had a moment to find out just what. 

“What are you talking about? I’m clearly capable of...” Szayel starts out with a very haughty tone in his quiet, shaky voice. You gesture towards his sides, bracing for a terrible reaction. You have to rip off the bandage. He’s got to get the message before this situation gets any worse. 

Szayel’s pretty gold eyes glance down to either side, right then left. For just a minute, everything is still. He blinks a couple times, swallows heavily, and sucks in a slow, sharp breath, his expression unreadable. 

“Did... d-did you do this...?” comes out first, slow and hesitant. His face is going a sickly shade of pale, almost white as blood drains away.

“I found you like that outside my house,” you say, blunt and professional as you can be. “I didn’t do anything but haul you inside and give you a place to heal. I’m a human. I don’t think I  _ could  _ cut off limbs.”

Szayel swallows again, shoulders starting to shake. It’s not a blow up  _ yet _ , just a quiet analysis of just how bad this could be. He’s worryingly easy to read. Pain must be shaking loose whatever walls he had. One of Szayel’s shoulders flexes, testing the area where the rest of his arm used to be.

And then, his breath starts to quicken. Little by little, the pace works up to tearing through his chest, full–on hyperventilation as you debate if you should try to touch him, if you should try to offer comfort. Szayel’s face scrunches up just barely, a subtle set to his expression that says everything. He’s terrified. The horror must be eating him alive. There’s something unbearably fragile in his eyes, and that’s the point where you know you have to do something. You worked through one, and you can do it again. 

Szayel  _ flinches  _ when you make the slightest move towards him. He jerks back hard, stumps curling in like he wants to hide. The matching intake of breath stings for you to even watch. He’s afraid of you. 

“Don’t  _ touch  _ me,” Szayel hisses, visibly trying to sound intimidating. “I don’t care if you’re just some worthless human; I will not be manhandled by something like you. Get out! Your stupid face is abhorrent!” As soon as the words are out, Szayel starts to laugh- a hysterical, wild sound that makes him seem all–too close to slipping apart at the very edges of what he is. The pressure in the room spikes suddenly, choking you under the weight of a cold, toxic feeling. Szayel glares daggers and keeps, keeps laughing. 

It’s all bluster. You know by now from Yylfordt’s behavior that all of that is an attempt to scare you off so he doesn’t get hurt. You remember Szayel’s head tipping back the first time you touched him. You remember the way he collapsed when you tried to be kind. You can’t take his words seriously. This is a scared little animal that used to be human, not something for you to fear. You’re here to help. You  _ will  _ help. 

“Do you want to get the blood off of you now?”

Szayel freezes almost instantly. 

“I said, do you want a bath now? I know it’s uncomfortable to be all bloody and gross like that. We can get you cleaned up, I can get you more food, and then you can rest all you need to.” You smile pointedly, scoot over to kneel by Szayel’s broken legs, and watch the confusion in his eyes. 

“And I said you’re disgusting,” he scoffs, watching your face for any change. He’s analyzing you just like he did the lack of limbs. 

“Fair enough, but I know you want to get clean. You don’t like being dirty, right? I think it would be nicer for you to not have to feel like that. Will you let me help? I’m not looking down on you. I just want you to feel better.” You’re treading dangerous ground and you know it. This is one of the many lines between scaring Szayel off and actually making progress. 

But instead of snapping at you again, Szayel stares at you for a long moment. Then, he looks down at himself, at the mess of crusted blood spattering his skin. He swallows again, aims a glare at the patches of blood, then looks to you again, forced pride visible in his eyes. 

“Fine. Do what you will. Just get this off of me.” Szayel all but spits the words out, sounding very much like he’d rather choke you.

But that’s as good of permission as you’re going to get, and you know it. You lean in very carefully, you get yourself to your knees, and even more carefully lift Szayel’s worryingly thin body off of the tile and into the bath. He moves easily, disturbingly light even with the height he has on you. As soon as his back touches cold tile, Szayel shudders, head tipping back. On instinct, you smooth a hand through the blood-matter fluff of his hair. 

When you turn on the warm water, Szayel flinches. Heat laps at his skin and his head immediately jerks up, staring at the contact between water and the stand–out tendons of his feet. You grab a washcloth while he’s distracted, already guessing that this is going to take you a while. 

You start with the leftover blood on Szayel’s face, gently scrubbing at the old stains. To his credit, Szayel cooperates surprisingly well, just staying still and letting you work. His eyes close as you wipe blood off of his hairline, this time carefully avoiding the thin, white lines of his mask. When his face is clean, you go for his throat and shoulders. You don’t miss the way Szayel’s whole body twitches at  _ that  _ bit of contact. The first brush of the now–soaked washcloth against the tendons in his neck earns a truly impressive jerk. 

You do everything possible to work quickly and professionally. You’re already in something of a dangerous situation with Szayel, and getting him clean as quickly as possible is going to be to your benefit. You know he doesn’t want to be touched. It’s necessary to make this quick. All he wants is to be clean. You can understand wanting that much blood off. 

Wiping down the pale skin of his shoulders, the sharp line of his collarbone, you’re mildly horrified by just how skinny Szayel is. He has muscle, tight and corded, but so little body fat that you can see every line of it. And worse yet, every muscle appears to be drawn viciously tense. 

When you get to them, you hesitantly unwrap the bandages around Szayel’s shoulders, hoping that the wounds will be decently healed by now. They are. What’s left of what looked like sawed–off meat when you first started has healed to the point where it’s mostly scab and fresh, pink scar, new tissue tender looking and vaguely shiny, surely sensitive.

But the blood has to be removed there too, and ignoring Szayel’s intake of breath at the first touch, you start  _ carefully  _ wiping at it with a fresh, soft washcloth. Szayel bites at his lip all the while. 

By now, the water is up to lapping at Szayel’s thighs. You know that the warmth is pleasant- not that he’d ever admit it. As skinny as he is, you have a feeling that being actually warm for once is a feeling that Szayel doesn’t get very often. A feeling that you’re going to repeat many times. 

You’re onto Sayel’s chest and belly, edging on to his hips. The water is going increasingly red. You’re going to have to drain the tub soon. You’re making good progress in getting the blood off, though, something which you’re sure both of you are grateful for. Szayel looks a little less broken when he’s not covered in red, you think. It’s comforting. You sort of wonder if he feels the same. Or if he’s so used to blood that this doesn’t matter. 

When you’re done with the front side of him, you help Szayel lean forward so you can get to his back. He cooperates even as he grinds his teeth, the desire to be clean winning out over any pride he has left. 

Every bone in his spine stands out. You can see his ribs from behind. You don’t know whether to be disturbed or overcome with sympathy. 

Szayel starts shivering as you work a third washcloth down his spine. Whether from the contact, the warmth, or any kind of pain, you may never know. You can’t see his eyes like this. Just the steady rise and fall of his chest, breathing stubbornly through the handling that you know he hates.

When he’s leaned back once again, when the tub has been drained of red and refilled, you start down his legs, wiping once, quickly, efficiently over his groin, careful not to linger. That’s a whole other issue that you don’t want to so much as touch at. Then, it’s onto the long, disturbingly thin lines of his legs, first thigh, then knee, then calf. Szayel keeps his eyes closed the whole time, refusing to look at you. You’re extra careful around the area where his snapped shins are still healing up, where they’re tender. 

By the time you’re done with his feet, Szayel is almost entirely not bloody. You still need to wash his hair, but that should be the end of it. You both are going to be grateful for that, you think. This is way too tense. 

“Okay, I’m almost done. Is it okay if I wash your hair? That’s the last of the blood on you.” You’re almost done. This is almost it. 

“Do what you want,” Szayel states with irritation, sounding a bit too far away. He’s probably dissociating, if not completely slipped out of lucidity. So that’s permission, as clearly as you’re going to get it. You’re going to have one blood–free Hollow. Both of you are going to be grateful for that. 

You get the showerhead down, neatly flicking on the spray. Once again, Szayel flinches at the first touch of heat, this time soaking through the bloody matts of his hair. You fill your hand with shampoo and begin. There’s no sense for either of you in drawing this out. You work through the blood as efficiently as you can, even if you’re almost affectionate in how you touch him. You want this to feel good, even if Szayel wants to hate it. 

Slowly, slowly, as you scrub and scritch at his scalp, Szayel starts to relax. Some invisible line of tension bleeds out of him little by little, an actual sigh leaving his lips when you hit the part where mask blends to skin.

And then, after what’s seemed like a small eternity, you’re done. You rinse the leftover suds out of Szayel’s hair, taking maybe a bit longer than you really need to with the hot water running through it, and that’s it. The faucet gets flicked off, the water slowly drains, and at last, he’s clean. 

You ease Szayel out of the tub even more carefully before, helping him into the blanket nest still on the floor. He opens his eyes long enough to glare at you, but doesn’t protest. His features seem somehow more relaxed than before, more exhausted than angry. You can see a certain relief in him, almost definitely over being clean at last. You’re getting the impression that Szayel might be a bit of a clean freak, considering that the blood seems to bother him more than the pain does. So maybe this all helped?

Just like with Yylfordt what feels like forever ago, you wrap the blankets in around Szayel while he’s still pliant. Relaxed as he is, he doesn’t have the energy to bite back at you like you know he wants to. 

That, and he’s probably barely lucid anymore. 

Szayel is shaking again, whether from cold or sheer weakness there’s no way to tell. It’s kind of nice that he isn’t snapping at you anymore, but it’s also worrying that he’s too subdued to do it. You don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that you don’t have to worry about him lashing out. 

You flick the heater onto a medium setting before you leave, Szayel already visibly drowsy. You can understand why he’s tired. Leaving the poor man to sleep is probably the best thing you can do for him. Rest is good. Rest is how people heal, even if they’re not exactly  _ people  _ anymore. You leave the room quietly, golden eyes glaring blearily at your back. 

. . . 

A few less tense days later, and Szayel is healing even more. He still slips in and out of consciousness more often than not, sleeping just as much as his brother now that he’s starting to relax. Well, relax is a relative term. Szayel is still wound tighter than a coiled spring under pressure, still eyeing you with something between distrust and frustration every time he’s awake while you’re in the room. You get the impression that he wants to say something nasty, but is too dead to the world to get the words out.

Eventually, you decide that he’s past the point where you need to keep him on the bathroom floor. There’s not really fresh blood anymore, just a lot of new, tender scars healing over the parts that were broken and raw. 

You really only have one place to put another person, though, and that’s in the same room as Yylfordt. Which is a bad idea on many levels. 

But... it’s not like you have any real choice. You can’t leave the poor man in the bathroom forever, and they  _ are  _ brothers. They can get along. Or at least, you can butt in and make sure that they get along. 

“So,” you start, praying for the best, “I’m going to be moving you to another room. It’ll be nicer than the bathroom floor, and I can make you a way better bed, okay? It’ll be great. Er, or at least better than this.”

Szayel’s eyes narrow. He knows you’re hiding something. This man is much, much smarter than you really want to think about. “Very well,” he says haughtily, staring up at you over the rims of his mask like he’d rather be wringing your neck. “Now, what’s the catch?”

“Ah... that’s the tricky part. Um, there’s kind of  _ someone  _ already in that room. It’s, uh... another Hollow.” Well, that was said well.  _ Not. _

“I was aware of this,” Szayel says, and you almost choke. 

“...really?”  
“Of course,” Szayel scoffs. “Hollows can sense each other. Something you _humans_ are incapable of. I may not have been able to tell exactly who it is, but the spiritual energy is weak enough that I can tell they’re no threat to me. Pathetic, I assume.” He sounds ridiculously, sickeningly arrogant.

Refraining from telling him that he’s just as weak right now. You go to move Szayel, praying that you’ll be strong enough to do it without too much struggle. Or more so, that he’ll cooperate enough to let you do it. 

Fortunately, Szayel moves easily. He’s light enough that you can hold him pretty well, even if his height makes it more than a little awkward. He glares at you the whole time with a look that you suppose he thinks is intimidating. Unfortunately, he’s down two too many limbs to quite accomplish that. As beat–up as he is, he just looks kind of sad and small.

You’ve already set up something of a blanket nest in Yylfordt’s room, and have already explained that his brother is going to be staying in the room with him. Yylfordt protested viciously, but caved eventually. Mostly after you reminded him that he was in the same state not long ago, and that even someone as ‘sick’ as Szayel still deserves somewhere comfortable to stay. Then, Yylfordt just called you stupid and naive for trying to help. 

Yylfordt is buried in the blankets on his bed when you get Szayel into the room. You carefully lay Szayel himself on the blanket pile, at which point he gives you a truly irritated glare, as if being handled by your filthy human hands is the worst thing to ever happen to him. Somehow, you doubt that you touching him a bit surpasses having so many pieces removed from him. Oh well. You can deal with some glares if it means fixing things. You tuck as many blankets in around Szayel’s body as you can, trying to be comforting.

And then, Yylfordt sticks his head out of his own blanket pile. His chopped–off hair is an utter mess, the horn of his mask snags on a blanket halfway up, and his eyes are so bleary with sleep that he barely looks awake. In short, he makes an utterly ridiculous picture. 

But then, the brothers lay eyes on each other. 

Szayel actually  _ chokes. _

“Wh-What are  _ you  _ doing here?” he demands, the stumps of his shoulders flexing with what you can guess is tension. 

“‘m stayin’ here, that’s what. You’re the unwanted guest here, so shut up and don’t irritate me, little bro. This is my place, and my human, and you don’t need to get in the way.” Yylfordt throws a cocky smirk at his brother, grinning like he’s not just as chopped up and broken as Szayel is. 

“Oh, be quiet. As if you didn’t force your way in here like the brute you are. Don’t tell me that someone of your lacking intellect did anything to earn a happy home other than shoving yourself in like a blade between ribs.” Szayel matches Yylfordt’s smirk with an equally smug grin. This is going to either be hilarious or awful. Maybe both. You’re sort of afraid. 

“Shut up. What’re you gonna do about it? You’re in pieces too, aren’t you? You think you’re gonna come up here and intimidate me when you can barely move? Stay on the floor where you belong, bro.”

Szayel all but sputters, glaring like he wishes he could choke his brother this time. You think he might try if he  _ wasn’t  _ that level of weak. 

“What do you mean by  _ too _ ? Are you telling me that you’re in such a state? I’m well aware that things have been made more difficult for me, but you think I can’t fix such a trivial matter. Ha! When I’m back to my lab, this incident will be nothing but a matter of the past!” Szayel all but laughs at the end of that, a wild look taking over his expression. You get the feeling that he doesn’t quite realize just how screwed up he’s going to be. Either that or he’s bluffing as much as he possibly can. Probably the latter. 

“Yeah, like either of us are going anywhere. You’re stuck here just like me, so get used to it. You’re damn lucky that the human likes taking care of shit like us instead of leaving us on the streets to die where we belong.” With that, Yylfordt uses his good arm to rip the blankets off of himself, making a very dramatic point that he’s just as mutilated as his little brother.

You can  _ see  _ the moment that ever bit of cocky arrogance drops from Szayel’s face, replaced with a sort of horror that you don’t even want to look at. It’s sinking in. It’s sinking in that he truly is helpless here. 

Suddenly, Szayel starts looks very, very dizzy. And more than a little nauseous. Can Hollows throw up? Probably. It’s probably a good idea to get in the middle of this before anything gets worse. You don’t need these two stressing each other out. That won’t be good for either of them. 

“Okay!” you chime in, forcing a smile. “That’s enough fighting for now. You two are going to go to sleep, and you can argue all you want to when you wake up. You both need the rest, and you know it. Right?”

“Fuck no!” Yylfordt shouts. “I  _ told  _ you that this one is a real bitch, didn’t I? I can’t be in the same room as him like this! My stupid little bro has to learn what his life is like now, and I’m gonna be the one to teach him!” He slams his good hand down on the mattress beside him, twisting unstably to face Szayel once again. “You’re not getting out of this, you sicko.”

“Hardly. I’d never back out of an argument with someone like you. Those with subpar intelligence will always cave to the geniuses of this world, and your little human friend is no different. You all can silence yourselves.”

In response to his brother, Yylfordt shouts something increasingly vicious. Despite Szayel’s own sharp retort, you can see that he’s getting tired, barely able to sit up on his own. As much as you hate to interfere with the problems of these two, you’re going to have to step in. Sibling fights are just petty in the end... even if you still don’t really understand how Hollows can have siblings in the first place. Oh well. You’ll figure that part out. 

“Quiet,” you shush, sitting down next to Yylfordt. “You can tell that he’s tired, so stop it. I’m taking care of you for a reason. Quit going at each other’s throats. Get along.” You give his forehead a little flick, staying far away from his bad eye. Yylfordt flinches just a tiny bit, glaring at you, but still goes to open his mouth all over again. Drastic measures it is. 

Sighing, you reach up and pat Yylfordt’s head, running your fingers through his hair. “Come on, shush. I’m asking you to knock it off.”

A shiver runs through Yylfordt almost instantly. Szayel looks at you like you’re crazy. You scratch lightly at Yylfordt’s scalp, and his shoulders drop. You know already that this will work. You’ve never known either of them not to respond in some way to petting and basic kindness.

“But... ‘m... he’s being a bitch,” Yylfordt whines, leaning into the touch. It would be cute if you didn’t know that they both need the rest. You massage your fingers at the base of Yylfordt’s neck comfortingly. 

“I know. We’ll deal with that later, okay? You can sleep for now.”

To punctuate your words, you go for the smooth, white bone of Yylfordts’s mask, running your fingers under the back rim of it. Yylfordt outright shudders under the touch, squirming a bit as a high whine leaves him. It’s a needy, tense sound, and you rub your fingers a little more firmly in response. You knew that Yylfordt wasn’t fond of his brother, but he seems more stressed by this than you thought. It’s probably simply being seen like he is; trapped with a human and mutilated to such an extent. 

However, Szayel is in exactly the same boat, and neither of them have room to really pick at each other over it. You  _ know  _ you’re going to take care of both of them. You know that they need it. It’s not like you’re going to abandon either of them because the other is here. Both is just fine by you. 

Over in the blanket nest, Szayel is going almost as pink as his hair. His face is downright flushed, and despite the look of near horror in his eyes, he’s not looking away. Rather, he’s staring directly at his brother’s face, watching as you take him apart. Hollows are funny about vulnerability, you think. For what you’ve figured out, watching this has to be downright weird.

“Breathe,” you tell Yylfordt, rubbing at a tender spot right below the base of his horn. “You need sleep, and you’re going to get it. Come on. Lay down.” Surprisingly, Yylfordt obeys. With a long, drawn–out sigh, he flops back against his own blanket nest, a low purr rattling up in his throat. Either your Hollow is a little more relaxed about showing weakness than Szayel is... or he’s past the point of caring. You don’t really want to know which it is. 

“F’ne...” he mutters, curling in on himself in a very familiar motion. It’s a comfort thing for him, and for most Hollows, you’d be willing to assume. Yylfordt is a creature of instinct. Cute, cute instances of instinct. 

And then, Yylfordt is quiet save for the purr still rattling his throat. His expression has gone soft, his face relaxed, and even the tense lines of what remains of his limbs have eased into something a little less jagged. You look at the scars that you can still see, pink and shiny and raised from his skin, but so, so healed. You’re very, very glad that you brought him home. 

Finally pulling away from the now–calm Yylfordt, you move yourself down to the floor next to Szayel, who’s looking at you with sheer mortification. His face would be funny if this wasn’t the exact kind of situation that you’re trying to avoid. His jaw is twitching, his eyes are comically wide, and his shoulders are even trying to hunch in. And best- or worst- of all, his face has gone straight past pink and into red. 

“Are you okay?” you ask, poking gently at his shoulder. Szayel jerks away, and gives you a look like he wishes he could rip that finger off. 

“O-Of, of course. I suppose I should be thanking you for getting that irritating brute out of my way. Unfortunately,  _ humans _ aren’t deserving of such niceties.” Oh yeah, he’s trying to bluster his way through this. It’s sort of cute but sort of sad, and you kind of just want to pet him too.

“I think you’re scared,” you state, because you apparently have no brain to mouth filter. “You look scared. I understand why.” You don’t exactly know why you’re saying it, just that you think Szayel needs to hear it.

Szayel gives you a vicious look, but one that’s tinged with something close to the exact fear you just described. His stumps twitch like his arms are trying to curl in. You know already that he’s trying to seem tough. The slight shiver in his shoulders is giving him away. You can imagine that if he still had hands, they’d be shaking like leaves. As usual, you kind of just want to hug him. As usual, you know that he’d absolutely hate that. 

“ _ Shut up, _ ” Szayel hisses, glaring viciously. “I despise you.” Oof. That must have struck a nerve. “You should have killed me from the start, put me out of my misery for good, not trapped me here with  _ him. _ ” 

Yep, there’s the same will to die that you saw from Yylfordt a while ago. You can’t say you’re not used to it, but you also can’t say that it’s anything short of worrying. Hollows are broken, broken creatures, and as much as you want to wrap your two up in blankets and makes sure that they never feel so afraid or miserable again, you can’t exactly do much for the mental scars. All you can really do is give them a safe place to rest until the physical wounds heal, until the mental wounds maybe start to. 

“I’m sorry,” is all you say. It’s all you think can be said this time. A lot of things hurt, and a lot of things will keep hurting for a long while. 

. . . 

Again, time passes. You keep Szayel in Yylfordt’s room... which is sort of both of their rooms now. It’s not like you have anywhere else. The two spend every waking moment either antagonizing each other or pointedly ignoring each other. You’re not sure which is worse.

They pretty clearly hate each other- at least on the surface. You have a feeling that the fact that they can even stand being in the same room as each other says something about just how much they really do ‘hate’ each other, but it’s not like you can safely poke at that. Hollows. That’s all you can really say. Their standards are weird and their behavior is weirder, and somehow, you’re perfectly happy with the two of them right beside you. 

And it keeps working, somehow. The two of them bicker, but never quite cross the line of too far. You come in and out, caring for them whenever you can, watching twin expressions of frustrated ‘I don’t want to like this’ on their faces. Szayel flushes while Yylfordt whines at you, and it’s quite possibly the cutest thing you’ve ever seen. They’re good boys. 

You have to leave the house sometimes, though, and as much as you hate to leave either of them alone in such a fragile state, you make do. Nothing bad has happened yet, even with the note left on your door. 

So to make up for every time you have to leave, you bring back gifts. Food, usually. Things that you by now know that neither of them would have ever had the chance to try. Szayel haughtily explains to you at one point that Hollows have no need for human food, and that in their world, all they eat is each other. You tell him that you think that’s very sad, and watch as his expression shifts into something that almost borders on uncomfortable. 

This time, after going grocery shopping, you’ve brought back a box of those fancy chocolates that have more flavors in them than you can name. Sweet stuff. Usually a good bet with Yylfordt, and always with Szayel. 

Szayel wakes up as soon as you enter the room. Yylfordt remains stubbornly passed out in his own mess of blankets and warm things. 

You sit down next to Szayel, unwrapping the box of chocolates with a smile. Szayel looks like he wants to be glaring, but you both know that he’s smart enough to realize that you bringing things back into their room is good. Szayel is actually a  _ lot  _ smarter than you would have ever guessed. You’ve known for a while that Yylfordt is kind of... not the smartest, but Szayel.  _ Szayel.  _ The things that come out of that man’s mouth sound like a stuck up professor half of the time, and go right over your head the rest. He’s impressive, is what you’re getting at.  _ Really  _ impressive. 

“What are those?” Szayel asks, his voice raised a bit to drown out his brother’s snoring in the background. You can tell just by looking at him that that part has been driving him up the wall for a while. “Human food, I see.”

“Yep. Sweet stuff again. I don’t think you’ve tried chocolate, have you? It’s good. You’ll like it.” You smile maybe a little too broad, and pop the lid off of the little tin. There are maybe ten different flavors to choose from- different fillings, coatings, and more. All shiny and whole in their box. 

For Szayel, you quickly decide on raspberry–filled white chocolate. Pink and cute, like him. ...even if you don’t think calling Szayel cute to his face would go over well. Even if he is indeed very cute. 

“Here, eat.” You hold out the chocolate, pressing it past his lips. 

Szayel eats obediently, even if he does glare a bit. As soon as the sweet hits his tongue, though, you can  _ see  _ a moment of rapture. Szayel’s golden eyes go very wide behind his mask, he inhales sharply around the mouthful, and a distinct shiver goes through him. That’s a favorite. That’s  _ definitely  _ a favorite. Chocolate was for sure a good idea. 

“Do you like that?” you ask, as if it needs to be said. Szayel’s eyes flicker over to the box like he’s been starved. He kind of has. 

So you spend a few minutes just slowly, carefully picking out one of each flavor to feed him. The rough edges of Szayel’s expression slowly ease out. His glare softens. He starts looking less like he wishes he could kill you and more like he really just needed the peace and kindness. 

Every bite of sweet eases him a bit further into relaxation. At some point, you risk running a hand through his hair again. Szayel lets you. Instead of snapping at you for touching him like usual, he leans up into the brush of fingers, eyes fluttering closed at the most recent bite. He’s mellowing out. It’s a new sight indeed to see Szayel at anything less than tensed up like a mean, distrustful cat, but it’s  _ nice.  _

You’re not sure if Hollows can get sick, but you quit while you’re ahead anyway, pressing one last bite of milk chocolate and vanilla past his lips. 

And that’s that. You spend one long moment, looking Szayel in the eyes, for once not forcing yourself to smile. The instant stretches on like it’s melting, hovering between some invisible line of where you stand. 

Yylfordt wakes up a second later, yawning obnoxiously loud. You think he might be doing it just for his brother’s benefit. Szayel glares at you one more time, maybe a bit softer than he’s trying to, then returns to scoffing at Yylfordt for being a disgusting brute. It’s normal, weirdly so. As if the moment from before never happened. You don’t quite know what to say. 

So instead, you climb up onto the bed, taking the remaining chocolates with you. You feed a few to Yylfordt, fluffing up his hair while he all but purrs. Szayel worms his way back into his own blanket pile quickly enough, ignoring the two of you with one more rude comment aimed in his brother’s direction. Somehow, you think that his words don’t sound quite as sharp as usual. Somehow, you think that he might not hate you so much. 

. . . 

Some time later finds you sitting in the brothers’ room, on the floor and considering what you’re going to do next. The two of them bicker like children every time they’re awake. You don’t know how you’re supposed to stop it. They’re both intent on getting under each other’s skin. 

But watching them sleep is a different story. Yylfordt’s blonde hair is a halo around his head, his one good hand curled close to his face in a shockingly vulnerable motion. Szayel’s fine features finally relax out into something almost soft, his legs tucked in half–close to his chest. They both look fragile and vulnerable and every other adjective on the subject that you can name. They both looking like they need protecting very badly. 

You sit there for a while, just watching them sleep. Both of them feel safe enough to sleep around you now. Either that or Szayel is just too tired to care. You resist the urge to run a hand through his hair.

Before long, Szayel’s eyelids start to twitch. He’s dreaming, you think, then remember what Yylfordt has said on the matter. Hollows don’t have nice dreams. Hollows have nightmares of varying intensity and levels of horror. Yylfordt has told you vague things about what he dreams, about feelings that aren’t his own and thoughts that tread dangerously close to memories belonging to someone else, about cold deserts and endless skies, about eating and being eaten in an endless cycle of fear.

_ Those  _ are the dreams that Hollows get to have. 

Szayel begins to squirm, a low whine leaving his throat. It must be a bad one. You debate if waking him up would be a good idea. His breathing goes sharp, unsteady, and he shifts like he doesn’t know how to escape. The soft expression on his face has been replaced with a stiff sort of terror. 

For just a moment, you think that that’s going to be it. Then, Yylfordt lets out an equally tense noise, dangerously close to a whimper. Both of them?  _ Really?  _ It seems like a stroke of unnaturally bad luck. 

Szayel’s little whine spikes, going sharp. You can see his chest heaving up and down. When you look to the bed, Yylfordt is gripping the sheets like a lifeline. Both of them have twin expressions of tension and pain etched onto their features. You’re not sure whether you should reach out and try to comfort them, or stay back to avoid making anything any worse. 

You’re just about to do something when Szayel’s eyes snap open. A noise  _ too close  _ to a bitten off scream leaves his throat like a plea. 

Yylfordt snaps awake a second later, breathing hard. You can hear fabric tearing under his nails. He curls himself tighter into his little ball, dragging the stumps of his thighs up closer to his stomach as his good eye flickers over to you, as if praying that you’ll be where you were when he fell asleep. You’ve never been more glad that you decided to watch them sleep. He stares at you with blown–black pupil, shoulders shaking hard. 

Meanwhile, Szayel all but freezes in place, his eyes painfully wide. He looks like he wants to curl up too, but can’t quite find the momentum without arms to tuck in close. His chest is shuddering up and down. His gaze darts back and forth from you to his brother and back again, looking like he’s half–expecting one of you to try to hurt him. You can see every vertebrae in his spine, standing out sharp against the skin. He’s so tense. So thin. You don’t know how you’re supposed to protect him. 

“Okay,” you say, if only to break the silence. “Nightmares, right?”

Yylfordt looks at the wall. Szayel stares at you with unparalleled intensity. You try not to let anything any worse come out of your mouth. 

“Y-Yeah.” Yylfordt is the first to speak. “You know we have ‘em. And ‘t least  _ I  _ can admit to it...” He trails off, looking pointedly at Szayel. You don’t know when trusting you became a competition to him, but here you are. You suppose that means he trusts you, which can’t be a bad thing. 

“ _ Shut up, _ ” Szayel hisses, squirming with still–healing legs. “You can shut up and stay quiet. I’m  _ fine.  _ You may be weak enough t-to, to need a human’s help, b-but I will nev-never fall that far!” For all his bluster, Szayel’s voice is shaking. For all his brave words, he’s staring at you like he needs a lifeline. You’re not sure how you’re supposed to handle this.

The room goes quiet. Neither of them say anything more, just stay in a glaring match that seems to go on for far too long. They’re both shaking. Szayel keeps glancing around the room like he thinks something is going to jump out at him. Yylfordt’s hand is still ripping holes in your sheets.

“You’re scared.”

It come out without you really thinking about it, and then the words hang in the air. You’re expecting Szayel to be viciously glaring once again, but when you meet his eyes, it’s to something terribly close to broken. 

Szayel swallows hard, looking like he could choke on thin air. You move to your knees and scoot closer to him, suddenly deeply aware of just how fragile this moment is. You could shatter it. You could shatter him. Both of them depend on you for everything now. There’s nothing else for them. 

“Let me help you,” you say next, because your mouth apparently knows no limits. “I want to help you. Let me make you feel safe.”

A muscle in Szayel’s jaw twitches. You’ve never been more glad that Yylfordt isn’t saying anything. Szayel sucks in a deep breath, and nods just once. You don’t know if his pride is finally dying a slow death or if he’s just so scared and tired that he doesn’t have it in him to do anything else. His skinny chest heaves in and out, the motion standing out as sharply brave. He’s fighting even now. Both of them always will be. 

You scoop Szayel up once again, still mildly horrified by just how little he weighs. You ease him into the bed on the opposite side from Yylfordt, then wiggle yourself into the space between them, pointedly ignoring how both of them move to flinch. This is okay. This will be okay. You’re going to make this okay no matter what you have to do to get it there. 

Operating on some weird kind of caretaker mode, you untangle Yylfordt’s hand from the sheets, tucking his head in against the crook of your neck. You let his hand rest on your belly, right over the softest organs that you know he never thinks he’s quite allowed to touch. 

And then, Szayel. The man’s eyes are squinched tightly shut, his breathing sharp and unsteady. You don’t know if he’s terrified or if he hates this, but you have a pretty good guess. For once, thinking that you might know what to do, you shift him closer to you. You let him tuck his face into the other side of your neck, right where your pulse is strong. You rub circles into his back with soft fingers, tracing over the raw lines of fresh scars. You breathe, and let everything in this moment be at ease. 

The two cool presences at your sides don’t say anything. Yylfordt hums low and quiet, but that’s the most that comes out of either of them. Instead, they both slowly sag in place, the tension bleeding out of them like water wrung from a rag, painful and hard–earned. They both breathe like they’re dying, and you hold on tight enough to keep their pieces together. 

You feel Szayel go limp beside you first. He’s asleep again, exhaustion knocking him out better than any drug. You glance down and see features pulled tight, and uneasy sleep that’s sure to be less restful than a relief. 

You look over, and Yylfordt is staring right at you. 

“The fuck are we doing...?” he mutters, ducking his eyes down as soon as you look too closely. “What  _ is  _ this? This kind of... fuck if I know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hollows are supposed to hate each other. Eat each other. There’s no being all close and soft with us. Not like this. It’s unnatural and weird and fuck,  _ I don’t get it _ .” Yylfordt’s voice is shaking. Just a bit. Just enough that you can tell how affected he really is. 

“That’s okay,” you try to say- 

“I’m tired,” is what Yylfordt gets out, and then; “I’m  _ happy _ .”

You don’t quite know what to say in response to that. 

Things go quiet. Yylfordt tucks his head right back up against your shoulder, breathing steady and low. The motions of his chest are so, so human. You don’t know how you’re ever supposed to consider him a monster. The cool ridges of his scars under your fingertips show just how much he’s been through before you. Exactly what he’s never going to have to go back to. Everything he’s been ruined for by whoever left him to you. 

“I love you,” is what you tell him in the end. “You may not understand why, but I do. You’re like family. I want to help you. If you can be happy here, I don’t really care what you started out as, or what you are now.” Too many things come spilling out, feelings raw like wounds. 

Yylfordt makes a choking noise, then buries his face a little closer against you. His chest shudders. His shoulders shake. He curls the fingers of his one good hand loosely into the fabric of your shirt. 

“What’re we gonna do with him? Are you going to love the both of us...?” Yylfordt is muttering again, voice low like he almost doesn’t want you to hear him. You know he’s talking about Szayel. If it’s really possible for you to love the both of them for everything they are. Monsters. Human–eating creatures that you should be meant to fear. Whatever you’re doing here, it’s breaking every chain of reality Yylfordt knows. 

“Yeah, I’m going to love both of you. That won’t be hard.” You lean down just enough to press a kiss to the smooth surface of his mask. 

“I... I trust you...” Yylfordt trails off. He all but snuggles closer to you, burying his face against your skin. He’s cooler than you, a permanent reminder that you’ll never be the same. You know he’s feeling your heartbeat right now. “I don’t know why, but... I want to...”

And somehow, that’s it. Yylfordt doesn’t say anything else. The room goes quiet, and before you know it, he’s asleep as well. Two cool bodies cuddle into your sides, one arm lies over your midsection, and twin breaths whisper against the skin of your throat. Everything feels okay, in a weird sort of way. As if the hard part, the fighting part, is over at last. 

You fall asleep there too, eventually, already half–dreaming of things that you’ll never be able to place. Sleep comes easy. Maybe you’re exhausted. Maybe you’re at peace. 


End file.
